I was talking with a friend and he was saying that link exchanges just aren't that effective anymore because small sites link with small sites and not with big sites making them stay small with traffic... Is this true, and if it is how do we fix that... and don't answer "link with bigger sites" I have connections with a bigger site and they linked me which is good and that helps me but I'm talking about the general sites.
Link exchanges are definately one way sites can gain popularity, but don't expect them to help your SERPs much because search engines are pretty good at recognizing them, and SE's tend to ignore/discount reciprocal links. So, if you exchange links with a site, you should only expect it to help your traffic and not your pagerank or your search result position. So, what your friend says is kinda true since bigger sites won't get much traffic from a little site (the balance of traffic being pretty one sided). That doesn't mean they won't trade links though. You simply have to find a bigger site that is closely related to yours first, then you have to create something "valuable" for them to want to link to. For example, asking joe's-popular-popcorn-shack.com to exchange links with sue's-unknown-widget-store.com would be pointless, but if sue's site had an authoritative history on popcorn or some really great popcorn recipes, then it would be a no brainer that joe and sue exchange links. Of course, if you have content the other site wants to link to, there's not much point in asking for a reciprocal link unless they won't give you a straight link first. That is, ask for a free link first, and if they don't give you one, offer to exchange links. A bigger site will never (or at least should never) exchange links with a smaller site that is unrelated, and frankly a smaller site shouldn't exchange links with a bigger site that is unrelated either. On the flip side, related sites should exchange links if they think the other site offers a valuable resource to their target audience regardless of the size of the sites in question.
If any body want to have a link exchange...and intend to do so in future you are most welcome....Mine is a PR3 site a tech blog....So link exchange from similar content are welcome. Mail me for request at You can visit my blog at http://blog.techiezone.in
link exchanges will allways help to get better page rank and better serp results (if you are making them with related sites)
link exchanges can certainly improve your SERPs. I proved this myself..my SERPs are much better with link exchanges, even much better than article writing (which I think are sometimes useless until we can create a good one not only USUAL contents) if link exchanges is dead, then all small websites will be dead. Not all people can think creatively in their content, most of them are very "USUAL". With usual website, do you think you can get how much natural back links? Link exchanges is not dead (yet)
Perhaps I was a bit to harhs on link exchanges. They certainly aren't dead, but the important key is to only exchange links with relevant sites. If you hold to the principle of doing things for users instead of search engines, you wouldn't exchange links with unrelated sites because they offer nothing for your visitors. As for the "correct mix" of link exchanges, Matt Cutts has definately pointed out that there is such a thing as too many reciprocal links (and mentioned again here, and here, and here), but little is mentioned about the proper link mix. One interesting tidbit I did find is that apparently only Yahoo pays attention to how fast you get links: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002925.html