A Word of Caution with Link Trading

[mandy]

You must be aware when trading links that all links are not created equal.

1. If you provide a prominent link to another site, make sure you
receive a link of equal or greater prominence.

2. Be aware, when trading your links with sites that receive substantially
less traffic than you do, that you will probably have
more people “link out” than “link in” from this trade. Consider
trading a banner ad and a link from their site for a link from
your site, thus making it more of an equal trade. If their site has
more traffic than yours, don’t mention it unless they do.

3. Never put your outbound links directly on your home page. Have
your outbound links located several levels down so that visitors
to your site will likely have visited all the pages you want them
to visit before they link out.

4. When incorporating outbound links, make sure that when the
link is clicked, the Web page is opened in a new browser window
so that the visitor can easily return to your Web page.

5. Sometimes when people update their site, they change the Internet
address or delete a page altogether. If you have placed a link on
your page to that page, and one of your viewers tries to link out
to that page and receives an HTTP 404 error, this reflects badly
on your site. You should frequently check your Web site for
dead links.

6. When you change content on a page within your site, don’t create
totally new pages; just update the content on your current
pages and keep the same file names. There might be links to
your pages and if you delete them, anyone trying to click on a
link to your site from another site will get an HTTP 404 error.
This results in a dead link on the referring page as well as in any
search engine listings you might have.

[jean]

Thank you for adding this information. I found it to be very useful.

[jean]

I haven't really gotten too much into link exchanging but a guy at work has a whole site designed to do it. He is ranked pretty high with it and made a lot of money. There are a lot of people that do it.

[aira]

a good reminder for those that have link partners. The most important about link building is this: "link only to related sites"

[jean]

Yeah that is a good key. I find that related sites are just competition though, so I have not taken too much time to do it.