*Link Exchange Topics Question*

Hi All:

In a link exchange, is it necessary to do the exchange with websites that are on your topic or close to it? Or can you do an exchange with any quality site regardless of the topic? I have received differing opinions from several people whose thoughts I respect.

Cordially,

 

Personally, don't think that at the moment it is key.

However, in the future, Topic Sensitive Page Rank (Which I don't think is yet in place) will play a fairly large part in all of that.

 

I agree with SEbasic ... in future it might be a reallity, but not anytime soon.

The only other added positive with linking with relevant sites is the quality of the traffic you will get from that site.

 

I am not sure that TSPR isnt in effect in some shape or form. I have sites that gained backlinks (a lot of non-related ones) but lost PR. Now I know this isnt diffinitive but it wouldnt suprise me if some sort of TSPR is being implemented.

 

I believe it is and I know webmasters who have been banned in Yahoo for over agressive link exchanges with non related sites. So look at it like this, if you are planning on adding 20 links to your sites and 10 of them go to unrelated sites, you will probably not have any problems, although the relative weight that you get from those links will be smaller than if you had linked them from topic related pages. Now if you are in a competitive field and you plan on exchanging links with a 100 or more sites, I would advise only exchanging links with related sites. Not just for topic sensitive links but because Yahoo and Google also looks at who you link to and their content to determine how relevant your site is to a particular topic (or keyword phrase).

Just always remember that the search engines reward sites that are relevant to their primary topic. That's what the SE's job is. If you are filling your Fantasy Football website (as an example) up with links about viagra or Palm Springs, how relevant is your site really to fantasy football compared to someone else who might have similar content to yours (or at least as much) but who also links to 20 great sites about Fantasy Football? In the scenario, you lose. It's always best to put your visitors first because that's the way the search engines want you to design your site.

 

Google is a moving, and TSPR is one of the things that I firmly believe is slowly being introduced. The point is that PR is just a number, it is simply a value of combined values, that hold no connection whatsoever to the words being searched for.

 

Hi Catfish:

Thanks for your helpful response - intelligent and explained very well.
It makes a lot of sense!

Cordially,

 

I do not think that is sound advice. If you meant pages I might agree with you but there is no way any of the search engines value links based on site topic at the moment.

To take your example

If you have a page with a write-up, on your Fantasy Football site, about a Football player who has admitted to wholesale selling of Viagra from his Palm Springs holiday home then a link to/from that page to Palm Springs or Viagra pages could be good for both search engines and users imo.

I don't think any of the search engines are as sophisticated (yet!) as a lot of people think when it comes to topicality but this is just an observation, although it is based on numerous test sites and hundreds of client sites.

- Michael

 

For very important website, I only link to very relevant sites or even link to good sites without requesting back links, but it's not easy to find enough revelant websites to trade links, I would do this more flexible with other sites.

 

I've spent a lot of time in link exchanges checking on numerous sites "related to my topic" and also all their backlinks looking for more related sites with which to get backlinks.

Last month about 5% of our traffic came from backlinks. I thought that was pretty good. Virtually all of that was from topical backlinks.

Over time our site has risen dramatically in the serps. Some of the early industry backlinks that we had going back several years have consequently driven significantly less traffic to our site. We are just easier to find. They still deliver traffic and I'm sure deliver relevant backlink impact to our site's serps in google. I'd vote for topical backlinks all the time.

Dave

 

I don't think anyone would disagree with that!

- Michael