Ad Swaps / Link Exchanges

Ad Swaps / Link Exchanges


Speaking of trading links, is it true that trading banners or text links with another
company similar to your own (or in a related field) is a waste of time? Not exactly. True,
there has been a lot of publicity lately stating, in so many words, that link exchanges are
not as effective as you once thought them to be. And this makes perfect sense.
Consider, that for a while, many poor marketers online were creating “mutual benefit”
link exchanges with each other in hopes of artificially inflating their external links—and
thus getting special attention from Google for being a high PR site. That’s not really the
same thing as a small company that actually works hard for its links by creating press
releases, blogs, articles for directories and other mediums.
So yes, many SEO “experts” were stopped dead in their tracks as Google and other big
wigs informed the world that link exchanges are simply not valuable in most cases.
Namely, when companies just use them as a means of leverage.
This is not to say that mutual link exchanges are always a bad thing. When there is a
good reason for a link exchange, as in a “blog roll” of authors who write on the same
subject, then the search engines will count that as a legitimate link. In some cases,
mutual link exchanges may work…but only if you prove to search engines that you are
actually working together (such as, guest blogging) and are not mindlessly exchanging
links for cheap traffic boosting purposes