In my SEO work I early on decided to do Link Exchanges only VERY rarely. Like hardly ever. Yet, long after the flurry of requests for these hit its peak, now years later as I revise this article, there are still emails arriving in my inbox proposing we exchange links with the sender’s website.
I have a variety of reason for deciding not to take them up on the offer, which I’ll cover later, but this blog entry will deal with first thing first – the inherent weakness, and even negative effect on your SEO, of exchanging links.
As everyone knows by now, one-way, inbound links to your site are the most valuable.
Those are the links from other sites, directories, etc. to you that you do not link to from your site. In other words, they point to you, but you don’t point back.
One-Way Links – The Established Bedrock of Solid SEO
What does that tell you? It tells you that you need to focus on those inbound links first and foremost. No one knows exactly how Google, or the other search engines, weigh a link.
For example, is a link from a Page 1 ranking site worth twice as much as a link from a website that ranks on Page 2 of Google results? More than twice? Less? You don’t know. And Google isn’t talking.
Even if you could figure that out, there are variables that we are aware of that affect things.
One of them is the number of links on the page where your link is – a link from a Page 1 ranking page with 10 outgoing links is not worth as much as a link from a Page 1 ranking page with 15 outgoing links.
How much difference is there? Again, we don’t know. What you can count on, though, is that the one is definitely worth more than the other.
Getting back to exchanging, though, the value of those top ranking page links to you drops if and when you link back to them. How much do they lose in value?
You probably know the answer already. What we do know for certain is that the one way link is always worth more than the exchanged link.
How You Can End Up the Big Loser In Link Exchanges
In the next post, or posts, I’ll point out some of the ways you can be burned through link exchanges.
The dishonest webmaster has more than one way to cheat you out of your benefits from an exchange – basically you can end up giving them a one way link without knowing it. But that’s coming up next time.