Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Does link Exchange help with SEO?

By Brent Sweet

I have done a lot of research on this subject. I have tried for years to just get one site I build visible to people searching in the Google index. When I studied Search Engine Optimization back at the start of the internet, the key was apparently Meta Tags. I started by slamming my pages with meta tags. Making sure my code was just a step better than the competition. I looked at sites ranking toward the top and I was astounded at what I found their keywords to be. Reputable businesses had meta keywords like Free XXX, Nudity, etc. Why? Because it that day these were big search terms, even though not related to their business, they wanted to pull any free traffic they good. One specific one selling contact lenses had stuffed their keywords with all kinds of crazy things. But they were ranking number 1. As you can imagine, I duplicated everything I could in their code I waited months, and I was never ranked anywhere.

So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn't build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn't even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.

I then went on to exchange links. I bought programs like SEO elite, which I do recommend for anybody to use, but not for this purpose. More on that program later. I also joined Linkmarket.net. I exchanged links like wild fire, making sure that my anchor text changed, following all the Guru's advice. They claimed this is how they got their rankings. Bull, exchanging links is absolutely worthless. After doing this for a month, I went to see if the Guru's were still offering link exchanges on their sites, if they had partner directories. Yeah right, there was no directories. They had already realized this was an ineffective strategy. Now links do help, search on Google for click here. Adobe ranks #1 and they don't even have click here text on the page.

The answer to the question is no you should not exchange any links. The two ways to get your site links that impact your rankings is to share information like I do and link bait. The article that you are reading is also helping my rankings. I just write about my experience and knowledge, then distribute it to webmasters who want to constant update their content to get indexed several times a day. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. That is how I get links to my site, without exchanging them. I exchange information for one way links.

There are two ways. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website that Burger King built. I don't know if you ever saw it, but it was a dude dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and crap. It ranked them number one on Google for the broadest phrase you could think of. Chicken. The drawback to link bait is you have to be extremely creative to get something built that people actually want to link to. Or you can pay an expert in this field thousands to create link bait for your site. There are better ways.

I prefer to use content sharing like this article you are reading. I publish informative articles and distribute them to directories that webmasters go to get content for their site. If people like my information they will publish my article. For instance this article will probably get published by SEO website trying to provide current advice on improving rankings. This benefits the webmaster because if they are constantly adding new content spiders will hit their site more, therefore each change will be indexed faster. That catch is that to use my content they must provide a link back to me in my resource box. This box cannot be modified. If no webmaster likes my article, it is still published in 1000s of directories that I submit to, creating great links back to my website. I do not have an outbound link on my site. I have meta tags that are almost worthless, but my 3 page site ranks very well for keywords due to content sharing.

To conclude it won't hurt to have a well coded big site, but that is not what pulls rankings. The best rankings I ever obtained are from submitting articles. I love to write the different articles and share information or knowledge I have for free. Also Google can tell that I am manually writing these because there is no duplicate information in them across the network. So they know that I am not trying to steal rankings, that I am providing legit information and a link to my site. This causes each link to have a nice weight with google. My job has become to promote my website through distributing information.

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