Search Engine Optimization Service, Seo

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If you deal with seo services, or you have a site or a blog, it is still very common to get in your mail a message saying that someone has visited your site, and discovered that you have a nice web page and they would be very happy to make a link exchange with you…

Now, for the sake of being clear to everybody let’s recap what a reciprocal link exchange is: I have site A that places a link to site B and site B places a link to site A. This is reciprocal linking..

Well, there is nothing wrong with this, but in my opinion taking the time to go around and going to look for web sites similar to mine and send a mail asking for a link exchange, is more like a waste of time. I try to use my time in something more rewarding as far as SEO specially if I think in terms of Social media Sites. To me this is an old way to promote a site, it reminds me of the early days of the Internet!

As all of us should know by now, the reciprocal link exchange has lost its effectiveness, Matt Cutts (Google engineer of the antispam team) even said that using this way to promote a site can be a problem so, why should we keep doing it? Maybe we don’t get heavily penalized but still it can be useless.

What do I do when I get an invitation like that? I try to change it a little bit to do something more natural to the eyes of the search engine. If I like the site that asked me to trade links I propose to come to my blog and comment some of my posts and for that their site is going to get a link back to them. I can do the same going to their site and place a comment and get a link to my site.

I don’t feel comfortable anymore having in my sites those pages full of links, and that is more of a negative impact for a web site than a benefit and even from a user point of view it can be useless, Google is always trying to give a better ranking to sites that are more pleasant for the user so, I am more than ever concerned about that.

I understand that as human being we have a hard time changing our habits even if we may understand that something has become useless but if we want to survive in the competitive world of the Internet we have to be willing to change bad habits.

An other thing you can do is you write a post in the other site or blog on a particular subject and place a link to your site from inside the article, the same can be done if the other person write an article and make a post in your blog with a link to his site, this is an other great way to improve both sites rankings.

So next time you get a mail with a request of a link exchange in the “old fashion” you know what you can do.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.