Guide to Link Exchange and Natural Linking Its a well known fact, that getting a lot of links to your website, is one of the most important, and best things you can do to get ranked highly in the Google Search Engine, not only the Google Search Engine, but lets face it, its the Search Engine Webmaster's are aiming at these days! Search Engine Optimisation is becoming more increasingly popular and growingly daily, and as such, there's millions of webmasters, company owners, and marketers looking for new and effective ways to increase backlinks to a website, simply for the aim of helping in a ranking higher campaign. Introduction to Link Exchange Link Exchange, is also known as a semi-decent way to get inbound links, or backlinks as they are commonly known, to one's website, in order to help with Search Engine Optimisation. Such link exchange activities tend to be more focused on by smaller websites and companys, where as bigger websites and companies have moved on to other things that they have found more effective for them. Link Exchange is simply contacting a website, (for search engine optimisation purposes this website should be related for a relevant link exchange), and asking for a link exchange, where the site offering the link exchange (site A), wants the person with the site they are contacting (site B), to put a link to them on their website, and in return they will do the same. This is done with the aim and intention of getting more links to ones website, to increase Search Engine Rankings in a search engine such as Google. There are many Link Exchange websites that are created to ease the struggle and time consumption from such tasks. These sites are solely set up for website owners (webmasters), to register their site on the network, and be a place for webmasters to find other webmasters with sites related to them (for related link exchange), and who they are sure will be up for a link exchange. These websites also check whether a valid link is on one persons website, and visa versa for the other webmaster's website. Link Exchange is often abused The goal for any major or competitive search engine is to display the most relevant results available for a Users search term (keywords) that are entered into its search engine. Thankfully, Inbound links (backlinks) are not the only thing that search engines rely on to bring up results, although they do help in ranking for keywords, having tonnes of links is not the only thing that would get you ranked for a search, otherwise, search engines could be manipulated very, very easily. Sadly, nobody does know exactly how the major search engines (Google, Msn, Yahoo) rank sites specifically, i.e. know their ranking algorithm. Google especially, are a search engine that take care to make sure their algorithm prevents people being able to manipulate their results, due to the fact Google is the most used search engine in the world, its important that they display Google quality results at a time that they are needed. You could get 1000 links in a day. Does that mean you are going to be no.1 in Google, or even in the top 10, for the keywords in your meta tags? No, not at all, or that should be the case. Many webmasters will do what they can, even if its just incorporating a links page for "SEO Purposes" in order to get more links to their site, gladly the search engines dont take lightly to such blatant spammy style attempts to rank highly on their SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages). Is Link Exchange Ethical? Well as most of us know, or like to think we know, Google and Yahoo are apparently penalising for certain link exchange activities that they do not "agree" with, or even just link exchange on a large scale. Of course, who can decide is Link Exchange is ethical or not? Its definitely a difficult call to make, and also a question that has never been branded an answer that is a fact. It is often seen, and believed, that gaining a lot of links in a short amount of time, and especially continual link growth, that can be seen as an attempt to manipulate search engines. There are exceptions of course, one I liked to talk about is the MillionDollarHomepage which received a tonne of links in a very short amount of time, and received no form of penalty, possibly though, due to the fact that the site had high traffic to match. Natural Links Natural links is basically, as the name suggests, gaining links naturally. Its not difficult to see that there are many people/webmasters who believe in gaining links solely to rank high for their chosen keywords, or key terms in Search Engines. Natural links should not include: * How many text is applied to how many links * Link Density - if there are a lot of links in one part of an area of a site, it would leave the visitor realising some form of link exchange is going on with this site, and if its clear to a visitor, it will be clear to a Search Engine Spider * Pagerank - If a page has a lot of links to it only from high pr pages, it can be seemingly either the webmaster has good contact with such sites, possibly owns them himself, or more likely that they may be purchasing links from other sources There are many more features of natural linking that could be included, of course, we could go on forever. I still think link exchanging does help, or there wouldnt be thousands of webmasters taking link exchange actions daily, although the knowledge of many outbound links affecting people is clear, due to the fact that their are such webmasters that like to put a "nofollow" rule on pages they link too. I personally spend more time writing and submitting articles such as this in aid to get more backlinks, and hopefully in time, as PR increases for this site, theres going to be more poeple asking us for a link exchange, so effort can be cut to a minimum.
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