Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Trading Backlinks a good idea?
-
New to the "backlinking" party. Wondering if its 'good practice' to trade links with other websites within a like-industry.
We've been receiving a lot of emails from other websites asking us to trade links. Is this a good link building practice anymore?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, Branagan. This is what I meant by "..a little knowledge being dangerous..." I've been reading a lot here and there (plenty here in SEOMoz) about the dangers of link exchanging and taking it as a hard and fast rule to never exchange links that is rather new due to recent Penguin updates. What I was missing was "excessive" or unnatural and that if it makes sense, is approached wisely and isn't done in bulk, it's still ok.
-
Might be worth checking that if they say they are going to link to you that they actually do so and that they leave it up. Hopefully if they are decent enough sites they wouldn't do that though...
As others have said, definitely only link with decent sites and only if it would make sense from a human point of view to do so.
Might be worth checking in GA to see if the site then refers you good traffic. It may help you decide which ones to link with in the future.
I wouldn't go mad with exchanges though.
-
Hi Gina, If it isn't clear enough in the comments, check the first video I posted and the sixth point in this one:
10 Myths That Scare SEOs But Shouldn't
Cheers!
-
Jumping in here with some confusion and probably an example of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous. Can someone please explain this to me? I thought that complimentary link exchanging has become a no- no. What am I misunderstanding?
-
If it makes sense to put their link on your site, then go for it. If it fits naturally and isn't out of place, then yes. Otherwise, no.
Basically just use your common sense. If it looks spammy on your site, don't use it.
Also, avoid having a page full of links. That's a huge red flag and could end up hurting you. And if they are putting your link on a similar page, you are better off without it.
-
I never really do link exchanges unless they are part of a blog post. Also, I don't link to sub-par websites or unrelated websites. It's okay to link to another site and they link to you. One example is I have my BBB Membership page point to my site and I point many links from my site to that single BBB Page.
Look at the site you are going to link to and ask yourself, "Can this potentially cause a problem in the future? What's the risk?" I have turned down MANY sites wanting to link exchange, but if they are willing to write a high quality guest blog post, then I'm fine with it whether I get a back link from their site or not.
-
Trading links with other quality sites in your niche is a great way to get links. Just make sure the sites you're linking to are high quality (not spammy, have pagerank, aren't using shady link tactics). A quick backlink check of the sites using OSE or Majestic is probably a good idea.
I usually like to put together a "Partners" or "Resources" page where I add all the links from people I trade with:
http://www.salsabythebay.com/resources/
Hopefully you can use the initial link exchange to begin a relationship with some of the other players in your niche, so you can collaborate on other projects too, like guest posting, interviews, etc.
-
If you exchange links with quality sites, relevant to your niche and in a useful manner from the user point of view, you should be on the safe side and could probably benefit from it.
Check out this video for more info: Whiteboard Friday - Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory Links
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Foreign Language Backlinks Be Valuable?
I've done a lot of searching on this subject, but I keep seeing conflicting answers. Are backlinks from foreign language websites valuable? For example, a travel website in English picks up a couple backlinks in Indonesian language (and other languages) from foreign sites that have a DA of 60-70 or higher. The topic is partially related, but the language is totally different. Would those links still be valuable for the English website's DA? Has this ever been answered conclusively? Thanks
Link Building | | David56751 -
Backlinks and SPAM
I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff
Link Building | | FriedmanSimon10000 -
Redirecting dofollow, high-domain-authority links from one site to another: good idea?
I have two sites that offer help for freelance writers. The first gets almost no search traffic and is very low priority for me. The second is my main priority and gets substantial search traffic. The low-priority site has a significant number of dofollow backlinks from high-domain-authority sites. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect these links to similar/related posts on my high-priority site? Would this potentially boost the SEO of my high-priority site? Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | John88990 -
Where to buy high quality backlinks in 2018?
I am searching for backlink vendors, only english-speaking websites, financial topic. Another option is business, news, technologies, cryptocurrencies related sites. Only high-quality, active and developed websites, real traffic, no spam. If you have some contacts of vendors of such kind (or if you have access to the right website), please share emails - would really appreciate that!
Link Building | | g01110 -
Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
Link Building | | MMAffiliate0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
India link building - any good ?
Hi Everyone We have clients that have very small budgets. We thought about outsourcing our link building to India to help with costs... Can anyone recommend any good Indian Link building companies that are well priced and that you have seen good results from ?? Any help would be much appreciated Thanks Guys Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
How to remove backlinks?
Hey guys, With all this anti over optimization movement going around with Google, I decided to do a link building profile audit. I see some pages with PR 0 and some pages that expired. My websites are not penalized at this moment, however I do want to avoid this at all costs. What can I do? Could a backlink from an expired domain penalize my site?
Link Building | | nrv0