Bad Link Exchange Practices

If you are doing link exchange, make sure to do it right! Did you know that there are tricks that some webmasters do.

Here are some thing you should know when exchanging links:

1. Inaccessible Link Pages - check the link page where the webmasters placed your link, sometimes they haven't placed a link to their link page and need to reminds them. Others do this purposefully, make sure that you can find a link from their home page to their links page.

2. Invalid or Indirect Links - check each new link to your site to make sure that it is a valid link that will contribute link popularity to your site. Also, look for the links that link to a script on the other site then redirects to your site. Even the links with nofollow tag, which tells search engines not to follow the link at all and will no good for you.

3. Linking to Banned Pages - avoid including your site any links to sites that have been banned by Google. Check the site's domain in Google, and if nothing comes up, you know the site's been banned and it's best not to link to it.

4. Unvaried Anchor Text - important to avoid having all of the links to your site use the same anchor text as one another. Google interprets this as a lack of variety as the result of artificial link popularity, and reduces its positive influence on search rankings. Encourage variety on the anchor text used on links to your site when do link exchange.

5. Whole Site Linking - be careful not to purchase a link from a site that will place your link on every page in their site. So many identical links from the same IP address make Google's spider suspicious, and Google will ignore the influence of whole site links like that.

6. Doorway Pages and Cloaking - Don't fall for one of those SEO schemes that uses doorway pages known as advertising pages or promotional pages and uses cloaking to generate lots of links to your site. While such techniques may see good results they are prohibited by Google and may eventually resulting to be banned from Google.

I don't do link exchanges myself, but have read that some more unscrupulous webmasters will make links nofollow but then stop spiders indexing the links page with robots.txt file. So the link looks like its dofollow but never gets indexed.

I know that is not so good do have links from the same IP address or site wide links, but if you get them from quality websites it's ok.

I have many site wide backlinks from other websites, and never got a penalization...maybe in the future?

Oh, I think you have to be more careful in doing link exchange so that you will never get penalize by G. Purchasing text links from sites that sell them can be useful in some cases but very dangerous in a way, so I am not into it.

I think that we must be aware on Bad Link Exchange practices and pursue a proper and natural link exchange to relevant niche whether it three way, one way or reciprocal linking. so both third party and your main site gets the benefit on both side.

thank you for the info. it was really helpful. i appreciate it

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Yes, there are a lot of people that offer link exchange but they just only dump your link on their site while their link on yours is really helpful to them.[/FONT]

That is why we should be more careful in dealing with those fake webmasters who cheated us in doing that kind of thing. Best thing is we can check our links to them from time time, so that we will know we need to email them that we can't find our link in their site.

Thanks for useful information!

Thank you for the nice post, it is really helpful.