hello i remember a couple of months ago, google start downgrading alot of PRs from websites because of link exchanges. i dont get why people are still doing so?
Sometimes, links are not about the link juice but rather the traffic it could bring. If your site gets enough traffic from similar sites referral, google and serp are not so important anymore.
I guess the reason for downgrade of PR is selling links.. or getting a huge amount of links in a short period of time.
Link exchange are solid free people mover. Also a lot of site don't care what google thinks about them.
Link exchanges are known comfort zones, and they aren't worthless, just degraded. I usually accept any link exchange request, even if it goes straight to a page with little more than links. I should ask that the links go on a different page, but haven't learned yet. You won't find many webmasters linking to content spam, so I figure they are worth a little bit.
Swapping links with a few related sites should not hurt anyone, including SERP or PR... it is when sites will swap links with anything or anyone that things start to get a bit mucky. To assume you will be penalized because you swapped links with another site is simply silly! Imagine linking to your SEO blog on Digital Point, now imagine a thread worthy of blogging about. You have just swapped links... do you really think you'll be penalized for that?
is it a good idea to exchange links in the footer (where it will show on all my pages, or just on a page where it shows only on that page)?
I put my link exchange on every page. What it has done for me (to my surprise) is cause a lot of views come to me. The other site seem to enjoy the attention I've given them and they are feeding me people. I only have 7 other sites linked in.
i link exchange to gain traffic so really i dont care about serps. they come when there are some quality back links and you too start getting hits from se's.
Not to change the subject too much, but when I look at a site to see if I would advertise on it directly I look at visitors, page viewed and time on site per person. Does other people look at other things I'm just ignoring?
Was this on sites that do "top 100 sites" list b.s.? The reason I'm asking is because I'm noticing sites that are doing this are getting really bad numbers.
Link exchange always helps, but need to do with relevant websites, The only reason for getting PR down through link exchange, that you are not managing your resources page, and make those like a link farm, not more than 20 links on a single page, and if you do link exchange with all types of websites, better to make resources page like directory.
No. Footer links can be misidentified as paid links and get your site penalized. Sitewide links may be of risk as well. Better to have a links page and exchange links on that.
Because Google also created a rule which said if people are selling links or sharing links to apply the 'no-follow' tag to the HTML mark up, this way Google doesn't apply PR or SERP data to the link.
I tried a scheme for 'partner' linking that I read about on DP - the idea was that you'd have a links page that was dynamically updated from a central database... I'd forgotten that I'd implemented this but after time I realised that my hits and earnings had decreased. Needless to say I removed this links page and after just a couple of days my hits and earnings have increased - I don't know for sure that they're related but only time will tell...