"Dear Webmaster,

I have visited your website today and I appreciate it. My website is similar to yours and I would like you to kindly consider adding it to your links page ..."

If you have an established website, then you will probably receive a fairly steady stream of link exchange requests and may be wondering how to respond to them.  These link building tips will answer your questions on the subject.

Why send a link exchange request?

A generic link exchange request, such as the one above is sent primarily to improve a website's position in the search results with Google and other search engines.

Google counts the number of links going TO a website and the more high quality, relevant, incoming links going to your site, the higher you will appear in the search results.

By swapping links with someone, you therefore both gain the benefit of that link.

Another purpose of link exchange requests is that visitors to that page might click the link and visit your site directly.  A relevant link from a page on a site with many visitors could generate hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site over time.  The links I'm referring to here tend to be on high profile sites and are more likely to be part of an article or on a specialised website.  If a links page is an unordered list of 100's of links, the only benefit will be to boost your position with search engines and is part of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short).

Building high quality links

There are several factors to look at to determine if a link is high quality, namely:

  1. PageRank - Google's measurement of the value of a link from a given page
  2. Relevance - The more relevant, the better
  3. Nofollow - A metatag or piece of html code that tells search engines 'don't count this link'
  4. Duration - Building links that last a long time is a crucial part of any link building campaign.

This page provides tips and information on link exchanges to help you identify which requests to respond to and which to ignore.

We also offer a link building service to generate relevant, high-quality one-way links to your site.

1. PageRank

PageRank is Google's indication of how valuable the link from any given page will be.  If a page has lots of outgoing links, this tends to reduce the PageRank.  If a page (or website) has lots of incoming links, this tends to increase the PageRank.

If a site is highly relevant and receives lots of visitors, you can ignore PageRank, as you will get visitors directly from the link itself (though you tend to have to go and find these sites, it's unlikely you will receive link exchange requests from them).  Otherwise, the higher the PageRank the better.

PageRank 0 - If the site is very relevant, and/or has a home page PageRank of 3 or higher, it may still be worthwhile, but generally these won't help your site.

PageRank 1 - If you have a fairly new website with a low PageRank and can only offer a PageRank 1 or PageRank 0 link back, this would be worthwhile.

PageRank 2 - Worthwhile so long as the link is relevant and there's under 60 or so links on a page.

PageRank 3 - Worthwhile if there's some loose relevance and there's under 100 or so links on a page.

PageRank 4 - Go for it unless there's lots of spam links or other off-putting factors.

Read more about PageRank.

Google only updates the PageRank score every 2-3 months or so, if a site looks poor quality, it might have a fake PageRank (where it previously forwarded to a different page, but they've changed the forwarding since Google last updated the PageRank).

Check the Alexa Rank - This indicates the number of visitors to a page.  1 is the most visited site in the world (Google.com, 2 is the 2nd most visited (Facebook), etc.  If a site has a high PageRank, it would normally be in the top five million or so most visited sites.  If it has no Alexa rank, or a low Alexa rank, but high PageRank, the PageRank might be fake.

The Alexa Rank is also another indication of the value of the link exchange, as the LOWER the Alexa rank, the more people visit that site and the more visitors you're likely to get directly from the website.

 

 

 

2. Relevance of links

When building links, ask if the site is related to yours?  Is it in the same geographic location?  Does it deal with the same topic as your site?

If your site covers a range of topics and the site is specific to just one of them, it's worth linking to the most relevant page on your site.  For example, say you have an e-commerce site selling clothes and you receive a link exchange request from a walking holiday site.  At first it might look like there's no relevance, but if you ask them to link to your 'walking boots' page, rather than your home page, this makes it relevant.

Language is another important indication of relevance.  If you have a French website, then a French link exchange will be more relevant than a link from an English website.  For French websites, we therefore recommend trying to get as many links as possible from France, or from French speaking countries.

As you're linking out to them, this makes the relevance more important, because Google can penalise sites that have 100's of reciprocal links.  (For one-way links, relevance is less of an issue, though it is still a factor).  Generally the more relevant a link is, the more valuable a link exchange will be for both parties, both to improve your SEO and to gain visitors from the links themselves.

3. Dofollow / Nofollow

If you view source on the page offering the link exchange, you may either see a metatag saying:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

Or you might see individual links and next to them in the code:
rel="nofollow"

The "nofollow" code effectively tells search engines 'ignore this link', therefore if a website uses nofollow, a link from it is only useful if you will get visitors directly from the link itself, not if your intention in building links is to boost your SEO and position with search engines.

The "nofollow" metatag makes ALL links on a page nofollow, the rel="nofollow" only makes that specific link nofollow.  Some websites use "nofollow" for internal links or just for specific outgoing links, so it's worth checking to see if other links on a page that are similar to yours use "nofollow" or not.

"Dofollow" is the default behaviour, so very rarely appears in the code, and means 'count this link'.

4. Duration

It's worth keeping a spreadsheet of link exchange requests that you've actioned and checking links every 3 months of so to ensure that they're still there, not all webmasters are ethical in keeping links active.

When you first do a link exchange, you can also check if at the bottom of the page it has links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ... 439, for example.  This indicates that they send automatic link exchange requests regularly and as new links come in, older links are shoved to another page, that will have a lower PageRank and be less valuable.  If you think your link will quickly disappear, it's probably not worth swapping links in the first place.

Building incoming only links to your site

As well as two-way links, which result from a link exchange, it's especially useful to build one-way links going to your website that aren't reciprocated.

If you would like help in building one-way links to your website (in English or French), then our link building service offers will create relevant, high PageRank links to your site, without needing to add any reciprocal links back.  Our main method of building links is to offer other webmasters links from another website that we own and in exchange, we ask them to link to your site.  We also have a large database of websites who we know are actively involved in link exchanges.