subject: Link Exchange – a power play [print this page] It is a truth universally acknowledged that webmasters seeking to build the prominence of their sites and their position in search engine results must of necessity engage in a dedicated link-building effort. All the search engines use the extent of inbound links to a web page as a means of assessing the value of that page, the logic being that if someone has bothered to provide a link to the page, there must be something
worthwhile on it, and the more links there are, the more worthwhile it must be. Quantity, of course, is not everything, and the quality of those links is also important, measured usually by the Google PageRank of the page on which the link is located. A number of different programmes exist which will search for web for sites offering high PageRank and keywords similar to yours that might make attractive link partners. All you have to do then, so the logic goes, is contact the webmaster and offer to exchange links.
However this process is not as straightforward as it seems. Brand new sites that need links the most, and for which the marginal value of an additional link is highest, are the hardest to build links for, since the value of the links which they can offer in exchange is lowest. So if you are seeking to play this game, you need to be aware of the power-play politics of link exchange. You will soon find that the majority of well-established sites have a form on one of their web pages an example) which you can complete and submit for consideration. Invariably the form requires you to put your link in place first. This involves around 2-4 minutes work, depending on the efficiency of your own process for posting links on your own site.
However, you have no guarantee that the other website will do anything other than say to themselves Yes, great, another inbound link for no expense', and not bother to reciprocate the link, reasoning that they will save themselves a few minutes work and the submitting party may not bother to follow up and go through the process of deleting the link they have put up, since this will be extra work for them. Indeed it is probably true that the effort of establishing that a link has not been reciprocated, and then deleting your link to that site, is more than the cost of maintaining that link in place (after all, this cost is little or nothing). Experience suggests that less than 10% of forms which you complete will ever result in a reciprocal link actually being established. This means that the 2-4 minutes work for a link submission has just become 20-40 minutes work per link that you actually get. Your link-building strategy has just become very expensive indeed.
