Today link building remains one of the most important aspects of off site SEO, and is perhaps the primary method by which to get a site to rank in search engines for chosen keywords. There are multiple aspects to a proper link building strategy (social bookmarking, organic links, blogging, web 2.0…) but what I want to discuss here is trading links.
I know that I have spoken on this topic on a few previous occasions, but the question of link trading (otherwise known as exchanging links) is one that arises often in my day to day work for my clients. I recently had an impromptu debate on this topic with a marketing expert who I met through one of the forums in which I am active. I expressed a desire to this person to trade links between my clients and hers, and she responded to me that she never traded links b/c she did not see any purpose in doing this. This post is therefore written in response to that debate (and if the person with whom I had this discussion is reading this post I urge you to leave your response as a comment)
Trading links is perhaps the oldest type of link building and dates back to the early days of the internet, and is also the most straight forward method of getting links (although not the easiest by far). In trading links you essentially make a deal with another webmaster in which they link to you and you, in turn link to them, under such a deal both sites benefit. Although this type of link building has lost much weight in recent years, as Google and other search engines have refined their algorithms – to the point where Google can now detect when a simple link exchange has taken place (I link to your homepage on my homepage, and you return link to my homepage on your homepage) link trading still counts in the eyes of Google. Additionally trading links has a secondary benefit b/c not only does it help you with improving your keyword rankings, but it also helps improve your referral traffic b/c (for example) if you are an author of a kids adventure book about summer camp and you get a summer camp in New Jersey to link to your book, it is very likely that many of the visitors to the website of the summer camp will visit your site to see what your book is about, and it is also likely that your sites’ visitors may be interested in a summer camp in New Jersey.
In addition to a two way link exchange (which isn’t as powerful for search engines as it once was) you can also do a 3-way link exchange, or a 4-way link exchange… Under this method, instead of linking 2 sites directly to each other, you link 3 sites to each other, where site “A” gets a link on site “B”, site “B” gets a link on site “C” and site “C” gets a link on site “A”, or, using the above example, you simply add a third site into the loop, so the New Jersey Summer camp would add a link to the summer camp adventure book, the site of the summer camp adventure book would add a link to a Summer camp stories blog, and the blog would in turn add a link to the NJ summer camp. (This is more complicated, but it also more beneficial and it is worth it)
Another important thing to consider when trading links (and another thing that was discussed in my debate with the marketing expert) is the page rank of the site with which you are exchanging the links. The answer to this is relatively simple, the higher the page rank of the page where your link appears, the better the quality of the link (as seen by Google), although if you are trying to increase your referral traffic the page rank question should not be of concern.
There is one more potential factor to look at when trading links; this is relevance of the links. It is always beneficial to trade links with websites that are similar to yours, regardless of the page rank – this will help to make you an expert in your field (at least in the eyes of Google).
To sum up, and to put an end (however temporary to the link trading question), yes, it is always a good idea to trade links. If you have any thoughts on this topic please leave a comment, I approve all legitimate comments.