Consider Carefully Your Linking Neighborhood

Link Exchanges Can Cause Great Damage With Google. As search engines like Google dominate the landscape, inbound linking will continue to be a major part of how high a website ranks. A few years ago link exchanging was quite new and an fantabulous place for understanding webmasters to exchange quality links with those who were like-minded.

Many Link Exchanges, mostly based on the original few, have sprung up promising an unending stream of reciprocal links with as many sites as you want. It's no great secret that the majority, if not all, who practice reciprocal linking do so in order to improve their PR, which in turn, can have a definite effect on one's rankings in the Search Engine Results. The actual degree of this effect is anyone's guess as Google have always been extremely secretive about anything regarding the algorithms or components, which decide the SE ranking of any given website.

PR alone will not do it for you, but I have seen too much evidence that it does definitely help your rankings when you have a ‘higher' PR provided that the links pointing to your site are from related websites. An incoming link is seen as a recommendation, so the higher the PR of the PAGE the link is from, the more weight the ‘recommendation' from that website carries. So, the upshot is, PR is the reason, result and purpose behind webmasters spending so much time, money and resources building reciprocal and/or incoming links.

To make your efforts and costs more efficient, you need to ensure that you use the Link Exchanges correctly. When you don't, you waste so much time (and that of those you request links from) and you also blow your chance for a good, high PR link a little later down the track.

Most webmasters, when they first list with an Exchange, generally have either a low PR or none at all. Many then proceed to request links from as many sites as their membership allows. Sadly, far too many of them request links from websites, which are not related in the slightest way however, that's not why we're here today. I'd be "flogging a dead horse" if I took up that particular issue (again!). Simply, it appears to me there are still millions out there who, for some reason, think a link from a Movie website will assist their Health Related site in Google or a link from a Diet website will help their Real Estate site. !

When requesting links from other sites, you need to appreciate of the PR issue, as it stands at that time. If you have no PR or a PR1, there is not much chance of being ‘granted' a reciprocal link from a PR5 site or page. The problem is, if you request such a link while you're still in the ‘low PR' bracket, that site will forever be listed as "requested but rejected", you don't get a second chance once your PR improves. So, six months later, when you have a PR3, you can't ask again, the chance is gone.

When you are a PR1 or 2, only request links from sites with PR1, PR2 and maybe some PR3 pages. Don't waste you chance by trying to get high PR sites to link to you while you offer no benefit to them. What they are effectively treating linking to sites that are much lower than themselves, is giving away some of their "PR Power" to you and getting nothing in return from you.

It's wise when you receive requests from sites that have a PR lower than yours that you don't necessarly disregard them but take a look at the website, consider their Alexa traffic ranking, a good amount of traffic is an indication that the site owner is getting hits. Even if it's thru traffic exchanges, it demonstrates at least that they're serious about BUILDING their website to be a worthwhile resource and this, to me at least, means PR will come and when it does, you will already have your link from them. It's basically a ‘term investment'.

Have a look at their Link pages and see if they are linking sensibly or stupidly. If they're using a ‘Directory program', my advice is to skip them. They can't possibly be only linking with related content if they have a huge list of different website categories, can they? Simply, take into consideration the entire look and feel of the site. It doesn't take long and you'll be surprised how easily and accurately you'll be able to predict which ones will end up with higher PRs in the next Google ‘update', from which you will benefit. It's also worth considering that if a website is banned, those sites that link reciprocally can be affected negatively by ‘association'. Yes, it's true!

Patience is the key to achieving your website goals and if you don't have it, and are tempted to try the ‘short-cuts' or go mad trying to collect as many links as possible from all and sundry, you'll end up much further behind, rather than progress with any great speed. It's true that your PR will increase with links from ‘unrelated' sites but these unrelated links can only hurt your chances in the Google as they explain this in their info pages.

Always remember what the real purpose for linking was and why it was practiced and why incoming links were, and still are, valued by the Search Engines. A link from a related site is a vote of confidence that they feel their visitors will benefit from your content and hence, evidence that your website is considered to be of value in a specific category.