Link Exchange
Link exchange with another website that is relevant to yours has been the way everyone has been taught. I believe this is one of the biggest lies or myths given to the SEO community.
When I first started out I read hundreds of articles that stated this concept. “You need revelant links or your page will be penalized”
I read that having relevant links will be the links that will put you on page 1 for Google, and other search engines.
I’m here to say from experience with my websites & others that it is a myth. I posted this story because I see a lot of new people in the SEO field trying this out, and see a lot of ‘SEO Experts’ doing this.
Here is how I came to the conclusion of the biggest myth in SEO
I started out with a mortgage website which everyone knows is a very competitive field. After reading these articles about ‘relevant links’ I decided to call around to see who would link to me. I realized that NO COMPETITOR will want to link to me. Any person would normally give up at this point, and probably have a nice looking website that nobody visits. It’s like buying a beautiful home, and all of your friends live out of town so nobody comes to visit.
So I started to obtain links from any place that would give me a backlink. Most people normally submit their sites to directories. Then I realized that nobody visits directories so I would not receive any referral traffic (wrong idea at the time). So I started blog commenting with a link back to my website. Blog commenting generated a LOT of visitors but the quality was garbage. I realized that nobody shopping for a mortgage would come from a blog or directory.
The weird thing was that people were finding me in the search engines, and from the same keyword. I realized that I was actually ranking for some decent keywords! What surprised me is that NONE of my backlinks were from a mortgage or real estate website. So I decided to go on a link spree, and start posting my link everywhere. What happened was that my site was penalized, and I dropped rankings. I realized that as fast as I posted links, the website owners were taking them down. Of course any Search Engine would see this as spam. Spiderbots would crawl the links, but would come back later to find out they were gone. Well I realized that this type of linking was going to hurt me so I stopped linking in places where they would take me down. Most of the places that do this are blogs. Most directories don’t care about your link being posted as long as it’s not an adult or gambling site.
So your question now is where you should get links.
Here are some examples
1. Authority sites – I started to Google my niche, and realized that there were a lot of nonmortgage related websites. I saw yellowpages, government sites, blog communities, article websites, etc. I noticed that ALL of these websites were/are considered an Authority website because of age, and the amount of web pages pointing to them. I also noticed that a few of them were listed on DMOZ and/or Yahoo.
2. Social Networking – There are a lot of social networking sites like Digg that rank on Google’s top 10 for pretty good keywords. These sites will give you backlinks, and a lot of them are recognized by Google as an authority site. Sites that receive over 50k visitors per month are good sites to get a link from.
3. Social Bookmarking – Believe it or not Google loves some of these backlinks. Whenever you bookmark a site, make sure to check your Google Webmaster tools within 2 weeks. If it shows up then you know Google likes it, and if it doesn’t then put that bookmarking site on the backburner. Try to stick with the websites that get crawled faster, and show up on your Webmaster tools.
A lot of people will not submit to the above because they’re afraid they will receive less quality traffic. I used to think like this until I realized that referral visitors wasn’t the purpose of submitting my links to these places. The main purpose was obtaining backlinks from websites. Sites that receive over 50k visitors per month normally have the spiderbots on their website everyday. If you post a link on these sites, then your backlink will get crawled faster, and your SERPs will update faster. This is how a lot of people can get their sites ranking for a keyword within hours or minutes. The best keywords will take longer to master, but building links will help you obtain rankings within the first page with the search engines.
