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Quality Link Exchanges for SEO

Earlier I was reading a thread at Digital Point about building backlinks, one reply in particular made it obvious that many people don’t know how to successfully link exchange. The reply said “for every 20-30 link exchange emails I send, only 1-2 people reply” – that’s only 6% of people replying to him, in my experience over 80% reply to my requests and I only contact PR3+ websites. The difference in our success rates probably depends on one or more of the following factors; where the email addresses were gathered from, not natural and customized the email was, and how good our own website is (quality, traffic and Pagerank).

In case you don’t know about the potential of link exchanges, I’ll illustrate it with an example; my Naruto Wallpapers gets 12,000 uniques per day from Google and the majority of the backlinks are from link exchanges, about 10-20 exchanges from sites with Pagerank 3-5.

Finding people to contact

Obviously the most beneficial backlinks are those from sites that are related to yours, have high Pagerank, and have high traffic, so we will search for those. For this step I like to use the SearchStatus add-on for Firefox, I recommend you install it also. Many people look for link exchanges on SEO forums such as Digital Point but the websites link exchanging there are most often low quality, luckily I have a better method of finding websites to link exchange with – Google.

Here’s some searches that will bring back great results –
  • naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact.php” – What this search does is look for all websites about Naruto that have a file named ‘contact.php’, a contact form. It also checks that the TLD is one of the popular, global TLDs which increases the likelihood of the site being in English thus saving you from having to browse and rule out non-English websites. This finds URLs like www.domain.com/contact.php
  • naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/contact/” – This search does a similar job to the first search but less effectively, it finds both URLs like www.domain.com/contact/ but also www.domain.com/contact/anime/4/ which you may not want. This search returns about 5x as many results as the first so if you didn’t find enough with the first, try this one.
  • naruto inurl:”(com|org|net|biz|info)/affiliates” – This search returns websites with a page about affiliates, which is often used as an alias for ‘Link Exchanges Page’. These websites will often be looking for link exchanges so this search is a very useful one. It returns URLs such as www.domain.com/affiliates/ and www.domain.com/affiliates.php. You could replace the word ‘affiliates’ with ‘partners’ in the search to find more results.
After those 3-4 searches you probably have 1000 search results but luckily you shouldn’t need to go through them all. Simply browse the results one at a time checking the Pagerank and Alexa rank of each using the SearchStatus add-on, writing down the URLs of the websites meeting your minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirements, you should write down roughly double the amount of exchanges you would like to make, so if you want 10 link exchanges find 20 URLs. My minimum Pagerank and Alexa requirement is PR3 and Alexa 500,000 if my site is new, higher if my site is old and successful.

Writing an email

Now that we have 20+ website owners to email we can get started. The emails I send are simple but work remarkably well, when contacting someone I will write something like this –

Title – (Their website name)
Body – Hi, I am the owner of www.narutowallpaper.biz, would you like to (exchange links) with my website?
Thanks, Dan.

Having the person’s website name as the email title makes sure they will read the email, if the title was ‘link exchange’ they may simply delete it. I keep the email short and sweet and unprofessional, this is suitable for Naruto related websites but for example if you wanted to exchange with SEO websites you would be better off listing your Pagerank. The professionalism should be changed depending on your website’s topic, if you want to exchange with an online store a couple of paragraphs may be more effective than the single sentence in my example above. Most of the websites we want to exchange with will have a title above their link exchanges like ‘Partners’, ‘Affiliates’, or ‘Friends’, if their website uses the term ‘Affiliates’ then customize the email to suit this, say to them “would you like to affiliate”.

The more generic and spammy the email sounds, the more likely the recipient will delete. To me the example listed doesn’t sound spammy because it’s out of the ordinary being so short, it doesn’t speak of things like ‘traffic’, ‘Pagerank’ or ‘rankings’, and it’s customized a little for each recipient.

Website Quality

For most website topics, whether a person will exchange links with you depends a lot on the quality of the website rather than the Pagerank or Alexa rank. If you have a great website that is only one day old most people will still exchange links with you unless you’re in a topic like SEO, but if your website is of a terrible quality but has traffic you may have trouble making exchanges. Link exchanges can be great for your search engine rankings, but only if you have a good website so people will exchange with you.

Hopefully you now know the potential of link exchanging, how to do it successfully, and how immensely useful a single Google search can be.

22 responses so far ↓

  • 1 David // Feb 13, 2008 at 6:51 pm

    Hi,

    Found this link from your post at the digital point forums. Thanks for the tips.

    Although are you saying you get good SERPs from only 20-30 recipricol link exchanges with high page rank sites? 12,000 unique hits, wow. If all it takes is some quality links then new starting web sites have something to hope for.

  • 2 admin // Feb 13, 2008 at 6:54 pm

    Actually, it took the 20 quality backlinks, good on-page optimization, keyword research and 5 months of waiting. The link exchanges is the most important thing though.

  • 3 Rich // Feb 13, 2008 at 9:09 pm

    i am in the process of some hardcore backlinking and appreciate this find. i consider this the “needle in the haystack” step and can’t wait to put some of this to good use. i’ll keep you posted. thanks.

  • 4 Tom // Feb 14, 2008 at 2:16 am

    Thanks for the article. I previously tried these e-mails with more text, explaining things. But perhaps that was too spam-like. I like your short approach and will give it a try.

    BTW: In case you’re using Outlook, you might be interested in ReplyButler, which can help you build e-mails from text modules.

  • 5 kashif // Feb 14, 2008 at 7:15 am

    I have recently starting building links for my blog which I just started few days ago.I find this article very useful and hope this will help me get some decent traffic.When I have some decent amount of content on my log and then I will start exchanging links through this method.

  • 6 icelebpics // Feb 14, 2008 at 11:40 am

    its a really nice article and may help new comers like me build backlinks… i found this post on DP and i must say excellent work

  • 7 Great Article About Link Exchanging | Ilkince // Feb 14, 2008 at 12:20 pm

    [...] Link: Here [...]

  • 8 Nic // Feb 14, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    So you’re saying all the other backlinks you got are through directory submissions and bait linking?

  • 9 admin // Feb 14, 2008 at 4:23 pm

    Nic, I don’t do directory submissions. Most of the quality backlinks were from link exchange, but I also got a lot of low quality link from the encouraged hotlinking.

    When someone right-clicks (to hotlink) I display the code they can use to hotlink the image which includes the image code but also a backlink.

  • 10 duddits // Feb 16, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    Nice & useful article!

    tanx for sharing !

  • 11 link building techniques // Feb 17, 2008 at 5:32 am

    Yes, this is a good way to get links. I actually used this for one site and the success has been dramatic without the “subject” inurl: thi sis good as it narrows down the relevant sites. Good tip indded.

  • 12 Chris // Feb 18, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    I found your blog through DP. Thanks for honest advice I’m going to start putting some of it to use on my new site. And congrats on http://www.narutowallpaper.biz!

  • 13 Free wallpapers // Feb 24, 2008 at 1:13 am

    Ya , a very nice and useful article.
    I hope this works for me as well.
    Thanks …

  • 14 Chris // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:36 pm

    If you have choice between using a contact form/email and filling out an existing affiliate linking form, which do you prefer? Does either method provide a better success rate for you over the other?

  • 15 admin // Feb 27, 2008 at 5:00 am

    I would go with the contact form since I don’t think many high quality (PR and Traffic) websites have affiliate forms.

    Although contact forms have worked well for me so I haven’t been inclined to search for anything different.

  • 16 The Blogger Tips // Feb 27, 2008 at 7:53 am

    Thanks for the useful tips. It helps.

  • 17 Asian // Feb 28, 2008 at 6:07 pm

    Foubd this from your signature at DP. I agree with the quality of site and relevancy factors. I get many link buying offers from webmasters who got totally unrelated sites to my blog. Naturally I refuse since I am not looking for quick bucks.

  • 18 Zack // Mar 7, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    I have recently started web and wondering how to build links. Your articles is very good and helpful, thanks for the tip…

  • 19 Text Links // Apr 4, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    Hi!
    Thanks for this article. It,s very informative. I have three year link building experience or your article aslo improve my mind wirth.

    James

  • 20 Mike // Apr 6, 2008 at 12:53 am

    I was wondering if you use sitewide or just homepage link exchanges? 10x

  • 21 admin // Apr 8, 2008 at 4:51 am

    Both site-wide and single page links are beneficial, but link exchanges are usually site-wide.

    Site-wides are better for getting your pages indexed, but either is good for the link juice.

  • 22 Samsung HDTV // Oct 14, 2008 at 6:54 pm

    Nice info on Link Exchanges. I have read these articles before but I always come back to your site for Info when I am building new sites to make sure I am following the correct steps..

    Thanks

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