Inbox flooded with link exchange requests? Have no idea if you should take them up on their offer or not? An interesting thread over at Highrankings discuss what to look for in a good link exchange. With link building growing steadly and more and more webmasters realizing the benefits of such techniques, it necesssary to use your time wisely. In my own inbox I get anywhere from 5-15 link requests a week. How many do I actually respond to? Maybe one email total. But rarely does it go beyond that. Last week I received two requests from a realtor that had the website name wrong including the page they wanted a link on. I wrote realtor back telling him this was of no interest and that he might change the way he approached webmasters for link exchange. Get the facts straight, and make it personal and of value.
Additionally most of the time the page that your link will be on, ends up in some psuedo link directory hidden deep within a site or very unorganized and of no value whatsoever to my site. These link directories and their category pages in my opinion are not effective ways to help grow your site. I am sure you can think of some you have seen lately. You must search out link exchanges that are a VALUE to your site for the search engines and your visitors. Look for pages that are not overrun with useless links. Also, be sure that on the link page a search engine spider can actually find your link. Avoid pages that parse the link with an outgoing script. My general rule of thumb is that if the email is automated: Do NOT respond back to it.
Some things to consider about these email: 1. Where will your link be located on the site? Cheap directory or useful resources page? 2. How new is the website, will it be worth your time to presue this link exchange? Will it actually help me in the search engines? 3. Is the site of value to users? Or is it just generated for the purpose of search engines rankings? 4. How many sites are on the page you receive a link from? More than 15, you might want to forget it. 5. Is the email directed to you or a huge generated email list?
If you just don't know what to do, you best bet is to take Scottie's advice: "Hit the Delete Button".
Continue reading I Am Kinda Sick of Link Exchange Requests
