5 Important Steps You Should Take Before Exchanging Links

I wrote this post on my blog a while back and thought I would share it with you guys. Original Post

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This month has been really busy for me and that is why I have not been able to update my blogs as regularly as I have always wanted to. Nonetheless, I try my best to keep sharing my experiences and knowledge about SEO, Blogging, Marketing and Moneymaking with you guys. Today, I am going to talk about exchanging links. As webmasters, we all know that link exchanges are good ways to drive traffic to your own website or blog, get backlinks and thus boost your website's PageRank. However, one needs to be very careful when exchanging links with other webmasters.

Link Exchange - What is it?
For those who do not know, link exchange is when two webmasters decided to put each other's website's link on their own websites. This is a common type of link exchange known as two way link exchange. The second type of link exchange is known as three way link exchange. In such a link exchange, a webmaster places his website A's link on the other webmaster's website B. In return, website A's webmaster places webmaster B's link on his website C. Thus, there are a total of three websites involved.


5 steps you should take before exchanging links

1. Carefully check the content of the website - You always want to exchange links with only quality websites that are regularly updated. Make sure that the content is interesting. Also, you do not want to exchange links with sites that contain adult material (and other content that Google does not like).
2. Check the website's PageRank - While content is important, a lot of webmasters also consider PageRank before exchanging links. Why? Just so that they can get a nice backlink for their site and thus boost its PageRank.
3. Verify the PageRank - If you consider PageRank as a major factor then I strongly suggest that you verify the website's PageRank. There are several ways to generate a false PageRank and you need to know how to detect fake PageRank.
4. Check if the website is a link farm - A lot of webmasters just create websites and then try to put as many links as possible on their website. Such sites with numerous irrelevant links are considered as link farms and linking to such sites can hurt your website's PageRank.
5. Check where your link will be placed - You don't want your link to be placed somewhere in the corner at the bottom of the page where no one will see it. Your link should be placed in a proper place where the visitors can easily see it.

Finally, I would like to say that sometimes you should not care about PageRank very much when exchanging links. PageRank is a good factor but it is never permanent. A website that has a PageRank of 6 today can completely lose it in the next update. Thus, try to get backlinks from websites with relevant and interesting content as well.

 

Nice post, thanks Great stuff for beginners here that get asked over and over

 

My personal #1a step, before any other considerations, is this:

• I don't even think of doing a link exchange with anyone I don't know personally. Otherwise, you may find that other site with the nice PR6 to which you are linking just sold out to a porn site for lots of bucks. So you are now linking out to a porn site (or pharmacy, or...).

• I violated my own rule on this once and ended up, unbeknownst to me, being linked out to a disreputable site. The one I had linked to initially sold out and became a shady site. As you can imagine, for a religious site like mine (see sigs), that was quite embarrassing!

 

Nice post. We have to see to it that we were linked to a healthy blogs/websites for the benefit of ours also.

 

What I do is I keep a record of most of my exchanges and then i just visit the sites regularly. If anything weird happens, i just remove the link.

 

thankx ，very good

 

Nice Post !

 

Great post, visitor can get here good information's.

Thanks man..

Cheers!

 

nice post ! ...good tips given too... i was once conned to link to a porn website too.

 

great post, himoacs....thanks for the share!!

 

are links to porn sites considered bad or are they simply irrelevant. i don't think google will actually penalize a site if it was linking to a porn site.

 

the most important thing when exchanging links is to make sure that you are linking to a good site and not to any link farm websites...

 

Nice article for get link

 

Great Post! It is also important that the website you'll be dealing with has a relevance to your site.

 

When I started out, I could not be so picky. I just accepted any link exchange from sites in my industry. Page rank and position didn't matter too much. I do advise people to be less picky at the start or else you'll never exchange links with anyone. Once you are established the advice above is great.

 

I believe that one relevant link delivers the same juice 40 irrelevant links would. Not to mention, too much irrelevant links may hurt you on the long run.

 

As far as I know, linking to porn sites can harm your ranking. It's best to avoid them.

Yeah at first you shouldn't be too picky but when you get a decent ranking, you should try to link with only relevant sites.

 

Your suggestions are good. Link exchange is necessary to any websites if web owner need traffics. Google guidelines are the best options to verify what is links carteriya.

 

I am trying to link mine with sites of the same topic at the moment. One site I have been waiting on for over a week and have had a reciprocal link on mine but they don't seem to be playing.

I know my content is good. Thats what annoys me, they are just fooling me around.

I will email them again and then take their link off. The trouble is it will be a good site to be linked to, its basically a link blog for my topic.

 

If you are exchanging links for Pagerank, you are doing it for the wrong reasons.