CelTrust Blog

Link Exchanges = No Ranking with Google

For the last 5 or 6 years that I’ve been doing web development, I’ve always been hit with one popular question: “OH JOE WILL YOU PRETTY, PRETTY PLEASE EXCHANGE LINKS WITH ME JOE!! PLEASE!” And like 3 years ago that was a great question! Some sites even found me asking for the same one. But now in our good old year of 2008, link exchanges are dead. Actually, they’re more than dead – they might even land you in a hole with google.

Why they used to work

These link exchanges used to work because hey – a link was a link. The important thing was that you were getting linked from a decent site, and others were recognizing your site. Webmasters also didn’t invest time into writing new content for websites as much as the internet demands in our 2007/2008 standard. The most sufficient way to tell about another site was to throw up a little “button” or “link” exchange to let others know about your site.

Quick and dirty “How Google Works”

When you search Google, your results come back in way under a second, so how does google do it? Well, the first thing that probably clicks in your mind is that google must have a database called “Google.” In this database, they have a table called “Websites,” and in this table there’s like billions and billions of rows (one for each website). And google must store each website that it crawls into this database, and when a user searches they do some crazy query.. Right?

Not even close. In a nut shell (I’ll write a post soon on my theory of how Google Works), Google stores every word and phrase that it comes across into a big massive keyword database linking to results ranked by a magical page rank number. When you search a keyword, it gathers all the keywords and runs through a bunch of magical algorithms and comes out with a bunch of pretty results (And it does it really fast).

So what!?

Well, you see. Part of that big fancy algorithm that google runs through is finding page context for links. When Google’s spiders crawl your website, they find the “context” and “scope” of the page and associate the links in the article with those keywords. So moving on…

What happens in 2008 with Links

In 2008, Google has evolved and become a smarter search engine. Google is all about offering “contextual” and “relative” search results (See Tim Nash’s Article for a good review on how search engine relativity works). That’s why google has that fancy algorithm to determine the context of a link.

So with that knowledge, you can come to the conclusion that linking outside of context just won’t work.

What does work?

Before you can actually expect to get any decent contextual links – you have to actually build legitimate relationships. For example, if you are homeless what method is going to be more effective: going to a guys door and begging for a home to live in, or meeting a guy, building up a relationship/friendship with him, and asking if you can have a place to stay for a while until you build back up your life. Obviously building a friendship/relationship with the guy is going to be the most effective approach.

Take that logic, and apply it to your dealings with webmasters. When I get an email from a guy saying, “Joe, please add me to your blogroll and exchange me links plz kthx bye.” I will do 2 things, 1.) Delete it, 2.) Ignore the guy for being rude.

However, if I get an email from a guy who says, “Hey Joe, I’ve read some of your blog posts and you have inspired me to start up a blog. Would you mind checking out my blog and let me know what you think? The link is www.ilovejoetysonblog.com . Thanks, your #1 fan.” Now this email would get me to check out the blog, and maybe even subscribe to the feed if there’s any decent content.

Next, leave some comments on the blog you are trying to hook up with. If they social network with Sphinn, reddit, digg, or any of the other 10,000 social networking sites – leave some comments. Let them know you are sincerely out there watching the blog.

What will this get me, Joe?

Well, it won’t give you instant gratification – and you shouldn’t expect it. However, it will help you build some relationships with other bloggers in the blogosphere, and if you post relative content, you might just get quoted in a post and get a nice back link.

Conclusion

Basically, if google only sees one link to you on a page – you probably won’t build much backing from Google. If Google see’s that you are being linked in blogs and on context, you’ll build more keywords and legit back links which = higher pagerank and more keywords for your blog. Even if you all out fail at building legit backlinks, at least you’ll make some friends along the way.

Tags: basics, Google, googlecide, guides, help, marketing, ranking, Research, SEO, Tips, whitehat seo