ForumsFinancing Tips

I think the issue is that you may not agree with everything a website says that you reciprocate with. Imagine if you had an ethics website and you swapped links with Eliot Spitzer... Watching after these fubars is potentially time consuming. However, I wouldn't go so far as to ditch the practice all together. It's still an excellent way to raise your site's profile. I would avoid blogs, however, which are more subject to the whims of their authors.

the person who said that must be an idiot--you should engage is reciprocal linking and linking period. I won't go into details but I recommend it, there is nothing Black Hat or Unethical about it, as long as it is relevant and not spamm.

Best,

Mike

Hey Designer,

NatOnline is right. I worked at Yahoo! until just recently and Search Engine Optimization is what we do. Thoughtful reciprocal links from sites that are relevant won't hurt you. However, they won't help as much as one-way links from sites that have high Google PageRank. There is no shortcut-- don't buy link spamming software or listen to claims about instant #1 rankings from using some automated tool. Search engines can catch those tricks. Yes, we can name a few tools and services that sort of work, but they inevitably get shut down.

And if you are trading links, try to get them into the body of some content, so the search engine can determine the theme. Plus, use good anchor text-- in other words, not "click here". If your business is relevant to the content on that page, you won't be hit with a penalty.

But no tricks. Even stuff like 3 way linking is easy to catch (A>B, B>C, C>A). Unless you are a spammer or playing in real estate (or another ultra competitive category), it's not necessary to do black hat stuff like cloaking. It's easy to rank for local terms and do local advertising--- geo-modified terms such as "denver plumber"-- since you're not competing against many other companies.

Dennis

I agree with you blitzlocal no tricks will keep your site in good standing for a long time.

Link exchanges with relevent sites to your content will not hurt your ranking, it's good for building a good network of links to your website. As Blitzlocal said, however, "Link bombing" will get you nowhere fast, as most of the this is just flooding a ton of B.S. websites with mixed up content. Play by the rules and build a solid network, not a house of cards.