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Why is Link Exchange Required? 

What does Link Exchange mean?

Link Exchange or Reciprocal Link Exchange can be defined as the practice of exchanging hyperlinks from one website to another that has similar themes. To put it more simply, it is the process of links with other sites. This is attained by sending emails to the owners of other websites and requesting them to establish a link exchange. This can also be done by putting your link on your website, and other web sites will place a link back to you. 

A brief history

The practice of using link exchange by website owners is not a new concept – it started since the beginning of the web. However, it gained popularity only in the last few years due to the big search engines (like Google for example) which started supporting or preferring sites that had more links in the ranking. This method was very accurate at determining the significance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google.

Good Link Exchange and Bad Link Exchange

Good link exchange increases the PageRank of a website which in turn increases website traffic leading to increased sales. Bad link exchange on the other hand can prove to be detrimental. There are lots of companies who promise to link your website to lots of others at a very affordable price. However, in most of the cases they only link your site to link farms i.e. those websites that only contain links but no matter or content. An authentic and proper link exchange must follow the ‘search engine link exchange policy’. This essentially means that it must stick to the following rules and regulations:

• It is necessary for the Link page to have a good ‘PageRank’.

• The link page must be acknowledged by other search engines.

• Typically, all the links displayed on the page must be accessible within two clicks of the main page.

• The maximum number of outgoing links should not exceed 30.

• The content of the websites must be similar to that of the exchanged sites.

Link exchange is very important as most of the search engines determine the popularity of your website by gauging the number of links guiding to your site. This process is called “back links”. The number of these external links that are pointing to your website also measures the “Link popularity”. This measurement is then used in Search Engine Ranking – the higher this ranking, higher is the traffic flow in the website.

Another important part about Search Engine Ranking is ‘link relevance’. So, the concept ‘more the number of links pointing to the site, higher the ‘Page Rank’ is not fully acceptable. It is also important to determine the quality of those external links. Each web site has its own ‘Page Rank’ or “importance”- so, a page that has a huge ranking will automatically improve your popularity which in turn will lead to a huge amount of traffic.

Thus in a nutshell mentioned below are the points or factors that show the importance of exchange links:

• The popularity of the website will step-up if the number of links pointing to it is very high.

• Higher number of links ensures that the PageRank of the website will also increase.

• If your site has a high number of links, its importance to the search engine will also go up tremendously.

• If the Search Engine attaches a lot of importance to the website, it is evident that more and more traffic will visit the site.

• Finally and most importantly – higher the traffic, greater is the sales and the website popularity.