Link Building, Link Swapping - (A Subset of Link Building)

The most time sonsuming form of work to do in order to get your site ranked well

by the Search Engines. Comes in many forms, but all take time to do right.

See “

Articles

,” “

Blogs

,” “

Blog Comments

,” “

Doorway sites

,” “

Classified

Ads

,” “

Craigslist

,” “

Directory Submissions

,” “

Forums

,” “

Testimonials

,”

“

Social Bookmarking

,” “

Press Releases

,” and “

Link Swapping

.”
Link swapping used to be a simple concept that just meant

two webmasters could scratch each other’s back by placing a

link on their websites, pointing to each other’s site, for mutual

benefit in the search engine’s eyes.

This definition became inadequate when Google decided that this kind of

swapping, although not actually bad enough to deserve punishment, was only

done in fact to influence their rankings, and so they made some algorithm

changes that complicated things for us.

The premise is simple, mainly because Google and the other big Search Engines

see all incoming link s to a website as a “vote” for that site’s popularity. (The

PageRank method.) Webmasters quickly adapted and put up a link directory on

each of their websites to automate the link-swapping of that site with other

webmasters. This method has largely lost its’ effectiveness, however.

Google has proclaimed that one-way links were MUCH more important, and only

then if they were for sites in the same niche or a closely-related topic.

If your website is about Penguins, then having some rude spammer come and

post his Viagra or Online Degree Program (or any other non-animal topics at all,

really) links in your directory will bring down the wrath of Googlebot on your site

in no time… Certainly before you get a chance to intervene and weed out the

offending links.

Overnight, millions of link directories became useless or even hurtful to their web

ranking because while trying to build them up as large as possible, webmasters

simply allowed links from other websites on topics other than their own to swap

links with them.

This does n’t mean that you can’t use an automated link directory anymore, but if

you do, you’ll want to manually verify each posting to ensure every linkswap is on

topic.

If you’re still manually trading links with a few choice websites, especially the

most authoritative sites in your niche, or at least the ones with the highest

PageRank in your nic he, and not using an automated link directory, you’ll be in

good shape.

Here’s a great, free link directory script that you can install to your own website,

however you really should be careful to limit your linkswapping to other sites in

you immediate market niche:

http://www.homebizfactory.com/Link_Trader_Pro.html

This method has its critics, however, and some webmasters won’t even use a

directory anymore because its obvious structure should be a real giveaway to

Googlebot about what its purpose is. These are usually the same people who

would say that you must link 3 or more sites in a circle, instead of just two.

However there has been no evidence that this works any better, as Googlebot

can just as easily follow three sites linked as it can two sites.

By
Future Technology

Online advertising

Captcha killer