I know they used to work. I have noticed some of my well ranking competitors are using this as one of their strategies. If it does still have benefit what precautions should be taken so you don't link to a "bad neighborhood"? If you have a lot of link exchange partners it would take forever to manually monitor their PR and look for a major drop or other penalty. What software would be good for this? Is a link partner that's giving you a PR5 link better than an incoming 1 way PR1 or PR0? Thanks.
I think you still need to take link exchange as a part of your link building campaign. But you should only exchange with relevant sites.
That depends on what your intentions and goals are. Are you exchanging links to improve your traffic? If so, then exchanging links would be a good thing to do. If you're exchanging them to try and improve your search rankings... well forget about it because it won't work.
If you choose good relevant sites - it works good. But that is important to have a reasonable amount of links on your page and outbound links should point to good, non-spamy website. I think PR5 link partner is better that one-way PR0-1. But it is even better to have PR5 one-way
I still do link exchanges every now and then and slowly submit my website into directories (High PR)... To help my website get a better ranking. My website is already a PR 3 and it has just been over a year since it was setup. I am looking to get a better PR, I.E. Something like PR5 +. My website provides quality website hosting and domain names at reasonable prices, so I cannot see why our site does not already deserve a good rank. ~ Mike
It depends on your website PR. If your website PR is low and your link exchange website PR is high and irrelevant then your website may be ban or may be down in ranking.
I still do exchanging links for my site, but I make it sure that they are relevant to my site. And I still prefer three-way over 2-way link exchange.
I have seen link exchanges working provided they are quality, the problem is it can take lot of time and resources to find quality partner reduced the ROI heavily. Unfortunately quality link exchanges can't be automated
I am still confuse because some people says reciprocal linking is good and some says its spam so what steps we want to take?
I agree with Three Way Links. I have found that these are better than the usual Two Way links. I am forver working on new links (Relevant) only. My site is good and i have a good and reliable website hosting company. If people like the company or site, they should link to it, to help it out and to show how proud they are of it. ~ Mike
Actually there's a limit and boundary concerning exchanges. How many can you put on a single page anyway? Even then, it can be easily detected by bots so it doesn't bring much benefit anyway.
Yes it is still valuable for MSN search engine. Yesterday I read the article written by the webmaster in which he wrote that one MSN search engine engineer says MSN love link exchange. But your link partners must not be link farm.
I did a link exchange between my PR0 site and a PR4 site - same type of site, very relevant - and both of us seemed to benefit. There is zero direct exchange of traffic between the sites but we both do much better in Google searches.
Link exchange to increase Page Rank does not work. Link exchange to increase link count does work but the quality of the links are bad. Link exchange to increase traffic if "just folly'. How many times have you reviewed a link page? And then followed that link for non-SEO reasons. Link exchange for keyword branding (ie standarized anchor text) mandatory. And finally, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are not revelant SEs when it comes to link scenarios. They are more on-page SEO driven.
Link exchanges to increase page rank does work, if the links are relevant and are done with care. (Not so many, so fast)... The other search engines rank partly by number of links and yahoo is very good for this link ranking. Links help if done right. Mike
Link exchange for PR seems not to work, but for SERP improvements there is a benefit if the exchange is relevant (theme related).