I’ve talked previously about the importance of getting relevant inbound links. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit more.
Virtually every day, I receive an email that sounds something like the following
I found your site and I think it would be a great addition to our site. Exchanging link is great for both our site because it improves traffic and search engine ranking.In good faith I have already added your site in our link directory. You can find your link at following address.
The email goes on to ask for a link back to their website in exchange for the link.
Often, when I visit these sites, they are simply a large directory of other sites that are loosely based on a particular topic. I say loosely because they’ll claim, for instance, to be about “cooking” or “recipes” (one of my hobby blogs is a food blog, so I get these a lot).
When I scan the list of links, they’re about all sorts of things and most have nothing to do with cooking. Many of them promote spammy topics like gambling and ringtones. Others seem to be about food from their title and description, but when you click on the link, the site is about something else.
These types of spam “directory” sites are not going to do anything good for your site in search engines. If anything, adding a link back to their site from yours can get your site flagged as sketchy because you’re linking to link farm neighborhoods – and possibly even get your site demoted in the rankings or kicked out altogether.
The moral? Don’t accept every request for a link exchange. It’s ok to exchange links with other quality sites similar to yours, but the best types of links are non-reciprocated links (that is, other sites linking to you without you linking back to them) from sites that are about the same topic as yours. Learn how to get more inbound links.
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