Great Article from CNET about link exchanges:

(CNET)
– Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and
technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results
on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man’s search-engine
optimization: the link exchange.

If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably
gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I
believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.”

We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox,
mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from
auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what
we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you
can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search
engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site’s
worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics,
thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old,
dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the
Web’s dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at
what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer
off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation
designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it
still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with
WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for
day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank
of another site he owns using techniques that don’t run afoul of
Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,”
he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get
PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball
rolling.”

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google’s novel approach to site
indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based
on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account
the worthiness of the sites passing along the links.

This
meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high
PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google’s official
advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to
yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain
popularity in the Internet community.” That, of course, sounds like
something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one,
getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a
very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other’s work and
help each other build up a following, but if you’re selling a product
or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search
results for things like “day-trading software” when you’re starting
from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations
for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization
for Search Engine Land, says “if you’re a new site, absolutely you want
to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart
fashion.”

Duffield says he’s very careful to only solicit links
from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging
links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to
computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to
tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the
ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of
prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his
targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock
trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along
his site’s information and offer a link exchange.

“It’s not
about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries,”
Duffield said. “When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see
the top three positions have this much page rank and this many
positions, and try to beat that out.”

As long as people like
Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing
obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in
guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s
Webmaster guidelines.

“Where it tends to get into tricky issues
is where people are doing it primarily for payment,” Sullivan said.
“Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that
people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid
links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in
general, saying it does not allow “excessive link exchanging” but
failing to define exactly what constitutes “excessive.”

Other
practices that are verboten include links to “bad neighborhoods” on the
Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content
but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually
identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant
enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. “If you
start thinking too much about not getting caught, you’re probably doing
things you shouldn’t be doing,” Sullivan said.

In an era where
SEO is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the
most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over
Google’s search index are those like Duffield trying to make something
out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank
equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point
that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link
exchanges only work to get one’s name out there: the real boost needed
to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start
discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and
social-networking sites.

That’s when your
search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said.
“If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all
over the Internet, what choice do they have?”

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