SEO Case Study II: Networking & Link Exchange
People said link exchange is already dead but you need to think twice before you say so. If you are such a noob who only know how to do reciprocal link exchange or resource page link exchange, I can make sure you won’t be at the top of competitive keyword’s natural listing. Everybody knows reciprocal link exchange, I guess. How about resource page link exchange? It’s something that most people offer. For example, someone at DigitalPoint sends you a PM, it looks like this:
Hello dear, I can give you link from my biz opp website:
http://www.domain1.com/resources.php
http://www.domain2.com/links.html
http://www.domain3.com/resource-links.htmlPlease reply and tell me about your websites’ PR and where you can place my links.
Ever got this kind of private message or email? This is stupid but people are still doing it. So what we need to do then? The answer is easy. Find in-content links, as always.
If you have one website, let’s say a business opportunities website, then you have to create one dummy site/blog so you can give backlink from this dummy site to your link partner. Personally I’d suggest you to create two dummy sites so we can do more tricks. Of course before you can give backlink to your link partners, first you need to build incoming links for these dummy sites. It’s going to be an intensive task to do but it’s worth it in the end.
You can find link partners everywhere, start by doing manual job (emailing the SEO people) and also by contacting forum members. Although most of people on the forum are totally rubbish (they don’t have quality sites) but sometimes you can find superb link partners. The ratio maybe is less than 5%, it’s like you send 100 PMs and you only get 5 good link partners. But as I said before, it’s still worth it.
Of course you can also start a new thread inside relevant subforum (for example in Digitalpoint, create a new thread inside link exchange subforum). You’ll receive many PMs although maybe not all of them have good and quality websites. Remember one thing, you have to look professional. Don’t send any email/PM like the above example but tell them how to do in-content link exchange. Tell them you are looking for a real deal, a link with anchor text inside their article pages.
In-content link exchange actually is similar to paid blog post (I’ve given you the example - SEO case Study I), but the difference is you have to give backlink to their websites from your dummy sites. Sometimes I even give backlinks from my real sites and in return I get backlinks to my dummy sites. But of course you can’t just link to everyone, you have to know what you are doing.
Personally, I don’t really care about PageRank. Usually I did link exchange after I checked my partner’s incoming links. Usually I checked how many backlinks they have for their sites and I also checked how many outbound links do they have in a page where they will give me backlink. If they have no outbound link at all in the page where they will give me a backlink, I will definitely take the offer.
This is also a grey hat SEO technique but it works until today. You can build your own network by creating 9-10 websites if you want and link each other but I’m too lazy for that. When I was still actively build links through the above link exchange technique, I felt I’ve spent too much time for that. So since the last few months, I even never trade anymore links with new partners. But believe me, if you do this technique and the paid links campaign I told you earlier, you’ll be on the top of Google (unless Google changes its algorithm).
(although it won’t help. These lowlife spammers will always try to go for it).