Link Exchange Programs

What is a link exchange program?
How to carry out a Link Exchange Campaign?
What is Link Popularity?
How to Increase Link Popularity Using Articles?
How to Write a Link Exchange Mail?
Useful tips for Link Exchange Management?
How to Automate Your Link Campaign Using Link Exchange Software?

Useful tips for link exchange management
Given below are some useful tips that will help you carry out a smooth link exchange campaign.

Use Top keywords as Anchor Texts
Anchor text or link text is any text which carries a hyperlink. It is extremely important to make use of proper anchor texts in all internal (links within a site) as well as external links (links that you will get from other sites).

For instance: a site 'http://www.xyz.com' that sells online shoes can ask for a link back using the anchor text 'affordable online shoes' or 'latest online shoes' depending on the keyword for which one intends to rank. Using relevant keywords as anchor text not only helps you get better ranking for that keyword, it also helps you increases your website traffic.

Get Links from High PR Pages
Exchanging links with a PR0 page is generally not recommended. A page can have a PR0 due to innumerable reasons, one being that the page is penalized or uses a robots.txt file urging robots not to index it. A page can also have a PR0 when it is liken using an uncrawlable link (like a JavaScript link) from other pages or is an orphaned page which is not linked from any other page from that site. Exchanging links with a site that places your link on such a page will give you no return value at all.

It should also be noted that some pages can have a PR0 because of the fact that they are relatively new. It is safe to exchange links with these sites though the link value will be quite low. To find out if a website is new you can make use of the archive tool http://www.waybackmachine.org. If the site is old and the link page has been freshly added then using this tool may not help. In this case one can consult directly with the site owner for clarification.

It is not said anywhere that exchanging links with PR0 pages should be avoided completely as all relatively new pages have a PR0 and will get a PR when Google next updates the PR.

Get Links from Sites that Attract High Traffic
Traffic rate of a website also plays an important role in identifying a potential link partner. There are many quality traffic checking tools online that can be used to find out how much traffic a website gets. One really useful tool that can give you an estimation of the traffic rate is offered by Alexa. This tool does not give you a comprehensive estimation but what it provides can help you get a fair idea of a site's traffic. Alexa estimates are based on the databases generated by Alexa toolbar users which is used to rank a site. This tool can be downloaded from the Alexa site.

Avoid Links from Pages having Hundreds of Links
Getting a link back from a page that has hundreds of links is particularly of very less use. Such a link may not cause an increase in traffic as people may not be able to find your link and in addition will not even be helpful from the search engine point of view. Many search bots do not even crawl all links on a page that has more than 100 links.

The maximum number of links that a link page can have is 50. Anything below 50 can be accepted but if a site offers you link from a page having more than fifty links then the best thing to do would be to request a link shift to a better page. Generally many sites have alternate link pages and will heed to such requests.

Do not Link back to Link Farms
Link farms are sites that are created specifically for the purpose of exchanging links. The sad fact is that link farms are considered as bad neighborhoods by search engines and any site taking part in a link farm or giving a link back to a link farm can get penalized.

More Information on Link Exchange
What is a link exchange program?
How to carry out a Link Exchange Campaign?
How to Increase Link Popularity Using Articles?
How to Write a Link Exchange Mail?
Useful tips for Link Exchange Management?
How to Automate Your Link Campaign Using Link Exchange Software?