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Nine By Blue founder Vanessa Fox is author of the critically acclaimed Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business, which has been called the “search marketing bible” by technology leaders. Be sure to pick up your copy today.
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July 19, 2009
Today, I was browsing apartment rentals in Riga, Latvia. I was searching via the Flock toolbar, which defaults to Yahoo search. I found a pretty good result that had all kinds of apartments, with prices, descriptions, pictures, and maps, and lots of great information about the area. This wasn’t a fly-by-night operation, autogenerated made for AdSense site.
At first, the site got me thinking of geolocation issues. The domain has a .lv TLD, which makes sense, as it’s a Latvian-based company, except that they likely are targeting an audience not in Latvia, and does the TLD prevent them from ranking as well as they could for searchers in other countries.
But then I got distracted from all of that by something else. In the left nav, along with events, bars, and excursions, was another menu item: Link exchange. Really? In 2009 a link exchange program so blatant it gets main menu treatment? I scrolled to the footer. Copyright 2002. But the reviews are from 2009, so clearly the site is still being updated.
I clicked on the link exchange option. That brought me to a page with link-exchange in the URL. The page instructs people to copy their text link code into their web sites and once that’s done, email them with information about the reciprocal link. Sure enough, looks like lots of sites have done just that. “Link partners” include an RSS feed submission program, online mattress sales, Canadian car insurance, and diesel electric generators.
These are my questions: the owners of the Riga apartment and all of the sites listed on the link exchange page know enough about SEO to know that links matter, but they don’t know enough about SEO to know that link exchanges can hurt you (or at the very least not help you) in the search engines? Clearly, the apartment site isn’t trying to hide its link program and the reciprocating sites don’t mind being prominently listed on the “reciprocal link exchange page”. Are these site owners following bad advice and know just enough to be dangerous? It’s a conundrum.
Sure enough, the site ranks #1 in Yahoo for relevant queries, but for those same queries, it ranks on the third page of Google’s results (and on the second page of Bing). And it’s a good site, with great content. It’s exactly the site I was looking for. And it likely would be better off without all the resource investments of that link exchange programs. The company apparently spends time reviewing incoming emails and updating the web site with links — they are allocating limited resources to something that’s actively hurting them.
Seems kinda crazy.
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.
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.
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
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