In previous editions of The Daily Feed I've chatted about the importance of link development. If you run a blog or website that gets a reasonable amount of traffic you've probably been approached a lot by people wanting to exchange links with you. Should you do it? That's the subject of today's Daily Feed.
I'll cut right to the chase: Google doesn't like link exchange programs. They have a page talking about link schemes and it says you'll be penalized if you engage in "excessive" link exchanges. They don't define what excessive is. But here's some interesting gossip. When this page first came out in 2007 the paragraph that deals with link exchanges read as follows:
Examples of link schemes can include:
link exchange and reciprocal links schemes ("link to me and I'll link to you.")
After receiving some backlash from the webmaster community they changed it to read:
Examples of link schemes can include:
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("link to me and I'll link to you.")
Notice the change? Clearly they don't like link exchanges and they'll tolerate some exchanging of links between websites but they aren't clear on how much that is.
My advice to you is the following:
- Only exchange links with 2 or 3 websites that are VERY relevant. If you have a website about coffee, then only exchange links with other websites that talk about coffee, and the same brand of coffee that you talk about.
- Don't exchange links with a site that has exchanged links with many other sites. They may be penalized by Google and best case they won't give you any boost in ranking and worst case they'll cause you to be penalized too.
- Install Google's toolbar and check what the site's pagerank is. If it's less than 3 then I wouldn't bother.
- Visit the site and click "view source" in your browser's view menu. Check if the links to other sites have a "nofollow" attribute and don't link to the site if they do. You can read about nofollow here.
In general I don't exchange links with anyone, but when you're starting out it's tough to get those first few links that help Google find your site. So exchange a few links with relevant sites but evaluate each of them carefully and limit the amount of exchanging you do.
Regards,
Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO
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