Search Engines and Link Popularity:
Are Link Exchanges Worth the Effort?

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When Google appeared on the search engine landscape a new paradigm called link popularity was born. The main concept behind it is the following: The more web sites that are linking to web site X, the more important this web site X must be. Google has defined link popularity as PageRank. A new web site that initially has no incoming links at all, starts out with a PageRank value of 0. A site that has a million other sites linking to it would possess a PageRank value of 10.

Link popularity - one of many ranking factors

Link popularity is an important ranking criterion, but not the only one. A site must be linked well, but it also must be optimized effectively to achieve good rankings. In addition, web site content quality and quantity are vital, as well as utilizing the correct keywords efficiently within the content.

In order to raise their link popularity, many web masters these days are focusing on link exchanges with other sites, i.e. they will link to another site and ask the webmaster of that site to link back to them to establish reciprocal links. Your inbox is probably full of dozens of such requests right now. And there are also various link exchange sites and forums where link partners get matched up.

What constitutes up a "good link"?

As good as this idea might sound in theory, it can be worthless in practice. Firstly, often links get exchanged with websites that don't have related themes. But links should always be targeted to a general theme: i.e. your vertical market. Secondly, many links can originate from pages that look like link farms: there will be hundreds of link partners listed on one HTML page. So in terms of increasing your traffic or building your PageRank, these sorts of links are completely useless.

Not only do reciprocal links sound like a bad idea in practice, the search engines may also be on to them. Every day is getting them closer to being able to pinpoint these kinds of link exchanges with higher precision. And even though not all search engines have the technology to ferret out reciprocal linking schemes, it is expected that this technology will soon become wide-spread. Since link popularity remains an important factor for good rankings, Google, especially, is expected to invest more and more intelligence into differentiating between important and unimportant links.

Quality not quantity will give you a solid linking foundation

In order to increase your link popularity, you should focus on high quality links from within your own market or industry. Stay away from automated link exchange schemes, don't answer reciprocal link emails and try to get one-way links from informational sites within your niche that have a good reputation. Although this method is much tougher than the old idea of reciprocal linking, the approach will pay off long-term.

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