Why Link Exchanges Don't Improve Your Website

If you own a website, you may have been approached by others or have looked into doing a link exchange. This service is a service where you exchange links with another site. These people have read somewhere on the internet that collecting incoming links is the most important component to improve search engine rankings. However, one important fact that many "marketing" sites fail to mention is the important of link quality.

Penalizing Low Quality Links

Search engines algorithms are always changing. The initial reasoning behind exchanging links is that the more sites linked to a certain site, the more popular it was. However, some marketers caught on and began arbitrarily exchanging links with anybody just to improve search rankings. Search engines quickly added quality of links to their algorithm.

This means that a large amount of links from low quality sites (site's classified with no quality content) can actually hurt your search rankings. Where do low quality links come from? Sites that only have a list of links with no content are low quality links. Sites that are built specifically for linking without relevant or useful content will not help you at all. In fact, they may even hurt your ranking if the site gets blacklisted with the search engine.

Rewarding High Quality Links

Lots of links to and from quality sites will help your search rankings. How do you get quality sites to link to your sites? My favorite way is to provide content that people genuinely like. If they like it, they'll link to it on their own site. Reciprocal links with other relevant sites can work as well, but I wouldn't bother spending time going to find these links. Spending money on a link exchange service or joining a link farm will rarely help you at all.