Make a link exchange

Link Exchange ("Reciprocal Link Exchange") is a practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the web. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google.

However according to some experts (reference required here), search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links. Instead, the popularity or credibility of a site is now gauged by one way incoming links to that site. In addition, analysis suggests (reference required here) that it is very important both that the theme of an incoming link be relevant to the page being linked to.

Link exchange between non related sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Link Exchange between websites in the same industry can help them and if the website owner does not want to link to direct competitors it is adviseable to exchange links with sites that complement the content of their website.

Many webmasters frequent link exchange directories to try and build up their link popularity by searching for other webmasters that are listed in the directory who are also looking to trade links. Many of these link exchange directories charge a fee for access to their webmaster database or directory but you can find many free ones out there if you search the net.

Link exchanges can sometimes be very useful but be very careful with whom you trade links with. As stated before, trading links with the wrong site can have a negative impact on your web site. The best bet is to maintain a 'strict' linking method where you neither accept links from non-related web sites or post links to non-related web sites.

Although it may be more difficult finding sites that closely resemble your site you will find that the end result is much better than simply linking to thousands of sites that are not in your industry or similar to your site in any way. Achieving ten links from sites that are close to yours is much better than getting a hundred from sites that are completely different.

Another thing to consider is that search engines look at the sites linking to you and derive a 'theme' for your site based on your web site content as well as content from the sites linking to you. There are so many things to consider and many 'undiscovered' methods that the search engines use that it is impossible to fully understand how linking affects your web site but it is generally known that links from other sites simply do not help your cause.