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Do You Want To Exchange Links?

June 24, 2008 - Filed under: web design — Tags: , , ,

Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.

“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: https://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/

For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.

Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.

I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.

Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.

If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?

Read Good directions drive traffic to your website

1 Comment »

  1. […] this post for more info Do You Want To Exchange Links? Comments […]

    Pingback by Lillicotch.com » Adding Links To A Site — September 8, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

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