Incoming Link Building REW Sites (Link Exchange)

[Brant Douglass]

Hi All, after searching the archives, I couldn't find any answers to whether or not this has been discussed, but, I was wondering has anyone considered doing an REW link exchange, where I would display your out of state REW site link on my REW site if you would display mine on yours? A co-marketing link exchange if you will.

It could be discrete, of course, with a link to member sites in the site navi.

I am relatively new to SEO though and would like anyone with experience to chime in as to whether or not this would be worth it. Obviously, my goal is to get improved results from an internet search by potential Colorado customers.

Here's my site still under construction: http://dev162.rewtemplates.com/

[SEO Nick]

I have a feeling it would lead to some unfortunately consequences.

[Gerry]

Hi Brant,
You're a few years too late. The search engines started penalizing or ignoring sites involved in reciprocal link exchange (even when the linking relationships were "triangular" so as to prevent the obvious two-way pattern), and it was abandoned for more organic, more difficult, more time-consuming and ethical ways of building a link portfolio.

[Brant Douglass]

Thanks for the replies fellas. I have a lot more to research to do on SEO. Any better paths you two could to point me regarding maximizing incoming links?

I like free clicks...

[SEO Nick]

I think your best bet for this kind of information (since there's so much to know/learn) would be to scour the forum for anything you can.

There's a ton of information floating around here.

[Joelrunner]

That's not to say that reciprocal links are bad - you'd just be wasting time if you were exchanging links on each other's worthless "resources" pages.

HOWEVER - if you were to write an article with an author credit and put it on my blog, and if I were to do the same, that's technically a reciprocal link, but since it's actually adding value to the web, it could be an effective strategy.

[webmaster]

It's still a constructed (or unnatural) "scheme" so could get you penalized - really depends on the auditor and quality of the content.

HOWEVER - if you were to write an article with an author credit and put it on my blog, and if I were to do the same, that's technically a reciprocal link, but since it's actually adding value to the web, it could be an effective strategy.

[Cleo]

Hi Brant,
You're a few years too late. The search engines started penalizing or ignoring sites involved in reciprocal link exchange (even when the linking relationships were "triangular" so as to prevent the obvious two-way pattern), and it was abandoned for more organic, more difficult, more time-consuming and ethical ways of building a link portfolio.

I know what you are saying is what everyone from Google on down is also saying. I have been studying this for about four years now and I am coming to believe that this may not be true when it comes to real estate or at least my region's keyword "Cyprus property" where all I see from almost all the sites ahead of me is an enormous number of links that are aquired through link exchanges. None of these sites are suffering and more than half don't even have any kind of content. I feel like I am losing the race because it seems that it is a race to see who gets the most links in any way possible. Unfortunatlly for me I have been concentrating too hard on building content.