Comments on: Search Shorts: Link Exchanges Are So 2002

By: SEO is not Voo Doo | IP Address Visitor

SEO is not Voo Doo | IP Address Visitor — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:42:30 +0000

[...] Vanessa Fox posted this piece last week to Nine by Blue. My in-person reaction to various small business people over the [...]

By: SEO is not Voo Doo | Pagerank Checker Tools

SEO is not Voo Doo | Pagerank Checker Tools — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:30:59 +0000

[...] Vanessa Fox posted this piece last week to Nine by Blue. My in-person reaction to various small business people over the [...]

By: Sasa

Sasa — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:23:04 +0000

There are certain industries where link exchange is the only way to rank within the vertical. They have been doing this since before Google for traffic reasons. You could go so far as to say that it is a cultural phenomenon. Travel is one such niche. It is not the worst in this respect.

The exchanges should be mostly on topic though. The kind of exchange you are describing is clearly not helping. Also the blatantness of it.

But then: Who is Google to say that this is bad behaviour? It has been around for ages. Although I concur in suggesting to just elimate any reciprocal link. But Google doesn’t do that. They still seem to value them somewhat. And as long as they do you will be caught in 1993 (which is where link exchange started, not 2002 where you think it went out of fashion).

You will see link exchanging going away just as soon Google is eliminating the Toolbar PageRank

-sasa

By: Andrej

Andrej — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:15:09 +0000

Vanessa, I know it sounds crazy. I run a website in a similar business (hotel and apartment reservations in Bratislava) and we last did link exchanges six years ago. I track lots of sites in our niche and you would be surprised to find out that many, many of the leading sites still practice link exchanges. You’d be even more surprised to see that these not only do not seem to hurt rankings, they seem to help.

Very recently I was looking for apartments in London. The no. 1 organic result (for “london apartments”) was a serious looking site with original content. I was curious what kind of links make a site rank first in such a competitive market. I was stunned to find mostly obviously exchanged links with other travel sites or footer site-wides from clearly affiliated sites.

Either competing sites’ link profiles are even worse or these links actually do count for something.

By: Patrick C. Price

Patrick C. Price — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:31:29 +0000

Vanessa,
You’d be surprised how many small sites have no idea about SEO. They heard, that you need links. Period. So they engange in every form of getting links and are convinced it helps them.

Although it might be 2009 in the Valley, it is still 2002 in many parts of the world and even 1999 in many others

Not crazy, just timelag.