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I started researching what is now known as SEO about 13 years ago. I tried over and over to build the site that I dreamed would rank at the top of Google. At the time I began the key apparently was Meta Tags. I made meta tags just like my competition, and made by key word density for the words in those tags higher. I figured that would easily put me to the top. I waited for months on sites, and I never moved at all. One thing I did find interesting is there were some reputable sites that were stuffing words in like pornography, XXX etc to try to capture free traffic on highly searched words even though their sites were not relevant to those results. Basically after nearly duplicating sites I never improved my rankings.
My next feeling was that it must have been the size of the site that had to do with the ranking. I had a problem though in that I would not be able to build large sites because there really wasn't much content on a subject. Every number one site seemed to have a ton of indexed pages. Then I cam across Traffic Booster Pro. This is a program that takes RSS feeds, randomized them and creates a ton of highly optimized pages. Within days I saw results. I was ranked number 60 for a very competitive keyword. I was so excited, I had finally figured it out. Google crawled several times a day. I had the bigger site. This program built all those pages I needed, and redirected each user to my homepage. I got a major increase in traffic for a period of time, but one day because Google crawled so much it crashed my entire data center. Then I noticed my rankings fell completely off Google. I figured once the data center was fixed and I slowed Google's crawl rate on my site my rankings would return. Big mistake, Google had penalized my site. My site doesn't even rank number 1 for the made up keyword in my domain now, all because of this program.
Then on the advice of some Gurus I decided to start a link exchange. I put code on my site on how to exchange links, and on top of that I joined Linkmarket.net to exchange links. I was able to secure a bunch of links to my site and I built a reciprocal directory with probably 400 partner sites. Guru's claimed this is how they go their rankings, but after some testing I decided to see if these Guru's have reciprocal links on their site. Guess what? They didn't. These guys weren't using reciprocal links to get those rankings. Once again I saw no results, and had proof that the Guru's pushing this also saw it as ineffective. I don't want this to be construed that links don't help. Look at the results for "click here" on Google. Adobe ranks #1 and click here is not anywhere on their site as a keyword. They just have a bunch of links with that anchor text. However, they are not exchanged links. I haven't found one site being number one on Google with exchanged links.
To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.
There are two ways. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website that Burger King built. I don't know if you ever saw it, but it was a dude dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and crap. It ranked them number one on Google for the broadest phrase you could think of. Chicken. The drawback to link bait is you have to be extremely creative to get something built that people actually want to link to. Or you can pay an expert in this field thousands to create link bait for your site. There are better ways.
Content sharing is what this is. I am writing an article to inform people. This article, if people like it, will be published on several websites for their users to read. A SEO website trying to provide some free advice may post this article as part of their website content. This benefits the webmaster because adding content frequently gets Search Engines to visit more. The way this can help rankings is if you want to make a change to your site, it takes no time for Google to reflect the change. The catch is to use my content they have to use my resource box. My resource box talks about me and gives a link to my site that I want. So I submit this to a bunch of free content directories where webmasters go to find it. When they find it they can publish it, and then I get links. The best part is even if no webmaster out their publishes my articles, the content directories still link to me. I don't link to anybody on my site, I do still have meta tags, though I don't feel they are very important, and my site has 3 landing pages that are indexed.
In conclusion, it is not a big site, nor meta tags, nor code for that matter. The best rankings I have received are from writing articles just like these and distributing. Plus it is so much fun to share information with the world through these articles. It is also manual, Google likes to punish folks inflating their results with quick fix scams like getting 1000 links in a day and such. These articles though, Google knows I took the time to write it, so it weights it very nice when it ranks my site. Like I said my basic job for promotion is to share free information, and then link it to my site.
My next feeling was that it must have been the size of the site that had to do with the ranking. I had a problem though in that I would not be able to build large sites because there really wasn't much content on a subject. Every number one site seemed to have a ton of indexed pages. Then I cam across Traffic Booster Pro. This is a program that takes RSS feeds, randomized them and creates a ton of highly optimized pages. Within days I saw results. I was ranked number 60 for a very competitive keyword. I was so excited, I had finally figured it out. Google crawled several times a day. I had the bigger site. This program built all those pages I needed, and redirected each user to my homepage. I got a major increase in traffic for a period of time, but one day because Google crawled so much it crashed my entire data center. Then I noticed my rankings fell completely off Google. I figured once the data center was fixed and I slowed Google's crawl rate on my site my rankings would return. Big mistake, Google had penalized my site. My site doesn't even rank number 1 for the made up keyword in my domain now, all because of this program.
Then on the advice of some Gurus I decided to start a link exchange. I put code on my site on how to exchange links, and on top of that I joined Linkmarket.net to exchange links. I was able to secure a bunch of links to my site and I built a reciprocal directory with probably 400 partner sites. Guru's claimed this is how they go their rankings, but after some testing I decided to see if these Guru's have reciprocal links on their site. Guess what? They didn't. These guys weren't using reciprocal links to get those rankings. Once again I saw no results, and had proof that the Guru's pushing this also saw it as ineffective. I don't want this to be construed that links don't help. Look at the results for "click here" on Google. Adobe ranks #1 and click here is not anywhere on their site as a keyword. They just have a bunch of links with that anchor text. However, they are not exchanged links. I haven't found one site being number one on Google with exchanged links.
To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.
There are two ways. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website that Burger King built. I don't know if you ever saw it, but it was a dude dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and crap. It ranked them number one on Google for the broadest phrase you could think of. Chicken. The drawback to link bait is you have to be extremely creative to get something built that people actually want to link to. Or you can pay an expert in this field thousands to create link bait for your site. There are better ways.
Content sharing is what this is. I am writing an article to inform people. This article, if people like it, will be published on several websites for their users to read. A SEO website trying to provide some free advice may post this article as part of their website content. This benefits the webmaster because adding content frequently gets Search Engines to visit more. The way this can help rankings is if you want to make a change to your site, it takes no time for Google to reflect the change. The catch is to use my content they have to use my resource box. My resource box talks about me and gives a link to my site that I want. So I submit this to a bunch of free content directories where webmasters go to find it. When they find it they can publish it, and then I get links. The best part is even if no webmaster out their publishes my articles, the content directories still link to me. I don't link to anybody on my site, I do still have meta tags, though I don't feel they are very important, and my site has 3 landing pages that are indexed.
In conclusion, it is not a big site, nor meta tags, nor code for that matter. The best rankings I have received are from writing articles just like these and distributing. Plus it is so much fun to share information with the world through these articles. It is also manual, Google likes to punish folks inflating their results with quick fix scams like getting 1000 links in a day and such. These articles though, Google knows I took the time to write it, so it weights it very nice when it ranks my site. Like I said my basic job for promotion is to share free information, and then link it to my site.
About the Author:
Brent Sweet is the President of Article Submission Express. This is a company that can help you distribute articles such as this through the internet for instant links to your site, and improved rankings. Click here to read more about Article Submissions.
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