Just about every day I receive a number of emails asking to trade links with someone. These usually come from 3rd parties trying to build links for a client, and they are doing it by exchanging links with what they consider to be relevant sites.
They refer to this as building links by using link exchange. How 2002, right. Lots of would be experts say link exchange or “reciprocal linking” is worthless, has no value, a waste of time, dead.
Even though I don’t completely agree, I quit doing link exchange back in about 2003. Why? Because the idea of “trading links” seems like a really inefficient way to spend your time.
Why is it inefficient? First because link pages have no inherent value. I like to compare the spreading of links with putting up election signs. Getting your links on link pages is something like putting your signs in special areas set aside just for collections of election signs. Imagine how it would go. You go down the street knocking on doors and you ask “Can I put up one of my signs in your yard? I’d really appreciate it.” They respond by saying, “Sure that would be fine. Come with me around back.” And they lead you to their little fenced in area out behind the tool shed reseserved for election signs like yours.
Of course nobody ever looks at these signs out behind the shed. Just like nobody ever looks at your links on link pages.
So what good are they?
Well, you might say that Google, Yahoo, MsN and the others have made even these links valuable by making a site’s inbound links one of the major criteria for determining who gets to the top of the search engine rankings. That may be true. As I said earlier, I am not convinced that reciprocal links are always completely worthless.
But there are much more efficient ways to build links. Ways that make much more sense.
Why spend your precious time (or your valuable money hiring someone to spend their valuable time) asking people to trade links when you could just be creating your own links? Yes, that’s right. Creating links - real “one way links” - the kind that everybody says are so valuable?
So that brings me to my other main point. Trading links is very labor intensive and inefficient. There are much better ways to do your link building. For instance, you can take the same time and create a couple of targeted blogs, create some articles, or do some commenting on relevant forums or sites like linkedin. Place your links in these places and ta da!, you’ve got instant inbound links.
Well, maybe they’re not “instant”. You have to actually write stuff in in your blogs, write and submit your articles, visit the forums and make comments. But how much more useful is that than spending your time exchanging links?
That’s what link building is all about these days.
For more ideas see our link building programs using Web 2.
