The Truth About Link Exchanges

The effectiveness of link exchanges has been discussed ad nauseum by the SEO community over the past couple years. It started with a major Google update where we saw many websites dropped in the list of backlinks shown for most sites. From there, we noticed it was reflected in the rankings. Doing hundreds of link exchanges with casino, pharmaceutical, and loan consolidation sites, no longer produced top rankings on Google. In my opinion, Yahoo! has followed suit to some degree, but MSN Search is still living in 2003.

Search engine comparisons aside, are link exchanges worth doing anymore? The truth is that it totally depends on your competition.

Almost two years ago I got into a debate with a fellow SEO who claimed that link exchanges should be scrapped forever as a method of obtaining links, regardless of the site or market. Today, I have been doing link exchanges as a large part of a link campaign for a real estate client, and have seen significant rises in ranking due to that. However, if I were to start doing link exchanges for my SEO firm's website, I could probably exchange until the cows came home and see no jump in rankings. Why? Because competition for the keywords I would be targeting (SEO, Search Engine Optimization, etc.) is at a different level than the aforementioned local real estate market. The SEO community submit articles, buy links, pay for directory submissions, and more. A bunch of link exchanges won't get a site to crack the top 100 in this market.

If the strategy of the top sites in a field is mainly participation in forum discussion with linked signatures and swapping links with unrelated sites, then simply doing a higher quantity of such basic tasks would put your site at the top of the rankings. Of course, submitting articles and paying for quality directory listings would be an even quicker, sure-fire way to the top, but that's besides the point. It all depends on what your top competitors are doing.