We've begone link exchange and have a lot links that would like to naturally have our customers link to. We have a link button on our homepage and then we have link pages by category. Does this make sense to anyone? Suggestions?
We are looking for the BEST and propper way to list the out going links on our site. These are links to informational sites hosted by others that are non-competative, like forums and blogs. We were considering a tab on our home page within would be catagories to individual pages with links. Is this correct? What is the max of links per page? and does this have any value in SEO or just value to our customers?
The answer depends on your priorities. If you are interested in providing the best quality links, integrated text links would probably be the best, though extrememly difficult to implement. A list of sites you link to can be in the sidebar, footer, or on a links page, though each of these has potential disadvantages. One advantage of a links page is that your inbound links will be one-way, since you are linking back through a different URL. Not all exchangers will like this and it is indeed second-rate, if you are getting an inbound link from a quality homepage. That's probably the best, however, from your point of view. In addition for possibly being dvalued for being reciprocal, the problems with housing many inbound links on your home page are several, not just SEO. One is that these links will be competing for clicks with your own inner pages and any ads. So you may want to keep these exchange links to a minimum from the home page. The link juice any page has to offer is divided by the number of links on the page, so each one provides accordingly less PR power. Over 100 outgoing links on any page is considered unfriendly by search engines. That said, I think primarily of users and link partners when placing links, and try to macthvalue with value in the most intelligent way to promote SERPs rather than PR. INMO, the best way to exchange links is to post anchored articles on each other's blog.