Large websites pay SEO consultants thousands of dollars to get high search engine rankings for their website.
Exchanging links, especially with a large website like CNET, is viewed by Google as a “vote of confidence” in your site who rewards you by improving your search engine ranking in searches for your keywords.
But with PageRank now being the currency to have when link building, does the old fashioned way of emailing a site and asking to exchange links still work?
It really depends – Evan Duffield thinks it does. “It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling.”
Links from sites with higher PageRank are much more valuable than links from sites with low PageRank.
Google advises “the best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.” But that seems obvious, right?
Since the web is so vast, even getting attention for a new site with superb content is a challenge. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization for Search Engine Land, says “…if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”
Paid links are clearly off limits and on the surface and Google appears to ban link exchanges in general. They say they do not allow “excessive link exchanging” without providing any definition to what excessive is.
Read more about building links and PageRank in the CNET article entitled Link exchanges: the poor man’s SEO
Tags: link building, organic search, search engine optimization
