Just Ask Matt - Answers

Do Link Exchanges Still Work?

QUESTION: (Gerald) I have a number of people asking me to exchange links. I have read that this is good, but can’t find anywhere how to do it. Any suggestions, or is there an article you have that would help me. Appreciate it.

Good question, Gerald, because we really don’t hear as much about link exchanges as we did in the past.  I think the big reason for it is it’s effectiveness (or lack thereof).  Search engine spiders are much smarter than they were 2 or 3 years agos.  And most will recognize a “link exchange” rather easily.

For those who don’t know what a link exchange is, it is when you approach another website (usually with similar content to yours) and ask them to place a nice, keyword-rich anchor text link back to your website.  In exchange, you will do the same for them.  Remember that an important part of SEO is backlinks (i.e., receiving links from other websites pointing back to you).  A few years ago, a lot of this “linking power” was represented by a Page Rank.  Getting high Page Rank websites to point back to you effectively will increase your own page rank.

Personally, I think Page Rank is a bit of a farce these days (at least the public one).  I do think the major search engines (like Google) have there own ranking system based on popularity, but it would not be public.  Still, getting links from “authority sites” with relevance (to your niche) is always key. 

Now getting back to the question…I think link exchanges (or “reciprocal linking”) is really not going to help or hurt you.  Any backlink (in most cases) usually will help you.  But if there is a reciprocal link, the spiders will usually recognize this and probably not give you proper popularity for it. 

Again, like everything SEO, this is speculation, but I know there has been a lot of abuse of link exchanges over the years (like link farms, paid text links, etc.) to draw a lot of attention to it.  I used to do it quite a bit.  I don’t really do it any more (unless I am quite friendly with the website and we exchange primarily for the traffic, not the SEO).  I think your efforts would be better suited to article writing/submission, press releases, even directory submissions. 

You can also consider n-way link exchanges.  For a 3-way link exchange example: Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A.  You can do this rather deeply, too.  But still, the search engine spiders are smart and may start recognizing the linking footprints.  The larger the “n”, the better off you are…but of course, this is a hell of a lot more work and requires some skillful coordination.

Personally, I have become somewhat of an a-hole about link exchange requests.  I don’t get as many as I used to, but when I do I usually ignore them. 

cheers…matt

P.S. If you want to know more about Getting Backlinks, check out SEOExciter.com.  (There are 10 free videos over there that shows you how!)

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Matthew BredelMy name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer. For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...

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The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VIII
(Continuing from Understanding Analytics:The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VII)
You have now implemented your statistics and tracking software on your website and it is now two weeks later. You decided to accept the loss of earnings for more data, so you increased your bid prices to about $0.35 per click. [...]

The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VIII

(Continuing from Understanding Analytics:The Frustrated Affiliate Marketer Part VII)

You have now implemented your statistics and tracking software on your website and it is now two weeks later. You decided to accept the loss of earnings for more data, so you increased your bid prices to about $0.35 per click. This close to doubles your traffic, but costs you three times as much. Still, over the last two weeks, you have made three sales on about 800 visitors. This cost you about $200. The sales do excite you, but the thought of losing close to $150 gnaws at you a little bit.

But something else excites you in the background. First of all, two of those three sales came from the same keyword. Secondly, you begin noticing some trends in your Pay-Per-Click campaigns:

  • A handful of keywords are dominating your expenditures
  • Of those dominating keywords, you notice that half of them have very good CTR’s while the other half have low CTR’s
  • You realize that visitors of high CTR keywords are spending more time on your website (and are “bouncing” less - “bouncing” refers to a visitor that arrives to your website and immediately leaves)

The funny thing is that the keywords that are bringing the best results are not the keywords you would have expected. They are usually not the keywords with the most impressions, but rather the keywords that are the most detailed and unique. You decide that this is an excellent time to start pruning your Adwords account and start thinking about expansion.

***********************************

To some degree, internet marketing will always be pushing you. Realize that there is usually always a better keyword, a better product, a better conversion and a better traffic source out there. Just because you are making a profit does not mean that you have reached its limit. Too many people simply create website and PPC campaigns with the hope that they will instantly make money with no further maintenance. You CAN do this, but you are probably missing out on more money and higher profit margins. Wasting money on keywords that do not perform is like throwing money away. Statistics will tell us this, too. Once we get one website up and going, we are all very eager to build another one just like it. But understand that to take a website that is making $1000/month to a website that makes $2000/month is a LOT easier than building another website from scratch that makes $1000/month. Why don’t more people spend more time improving what they already have?

1) They are lazy

2) They are bored with it a ready for something new

3) If it is not broken, why fix it

I have been guilty of all three of these at one point or another. And realize that the research we are doing right now is going to leverage us into the next big hurdle of online marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

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One Response to “Burning Money On PPCs Effectively”

  1. Are there more testimonials around the site?

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