Hello everyone. Just found this forum not too long ago, been reading around and finally decided to start posting. My name is Scott and I look forward to learning and helping with all of you. My Question is obvious from the title. Are sites like Linkmarket.com or Exchanges.net good for your PR? My friend, who started his online business around 10 years ago, swears by them and his sites are actually making him a large chunk of money per month. But from the sounds of recent SEO podcasts/tutorials, it seems that they actually hurt your ranking in search engines. I currently have 2 sites on the 2 mentioned link exchange sites and have been running them for about 2 months. I would hate to know that I've been digging myself slightly deeper with every reciprocal link.
That's a good question, I have been working with local business and video submissions so I am not familiar with this process. I would be interested in hearing the experts opinion from the forum! John
I would personally say they're of limited use. Some people on these boards report having success with them still, but they're pretty old-school and Google has done a lot of pretty good work cracking down on them. It might help you, but I would personally focus my efforts on one way links - they're far more valuable. I suspect that even if you do get a short term rank improvement from reciprocal links and link exchanges, it's not likely to last very long. Especially if that's all you're doing. If you do decide to do reciprocal link building activity, just make sure you do it in a targeted way within your niche - outbound links can be harmful if you're linking to spammy or irrelevant content. And make sure you're not being ripped off - plenty of people selling reciprocal links have developed pretty clever ways to make sure that their link to you doesn't count - using form POSTs, or hiding it on some page X many clicks from their home page.
they are NOT good. read my blogpost here on link exchange: http://blogs.digitalpoint.com/entry.php?b=54