5 Important Steps You Should Take Before Exchanging Links

This month has been really busy for me and that is why I have not been able to update my blogs as regularly as I have always wanted to. Nonetheless, I try my best to keep sharing my experiences and knowledge about SEO, Blogging, Marketing and Moneymaking with you guys. Today, I am going to talk about exchanging links. As webmasters, we all know that link exchanges are good ways to drive traffic to your own website or blog, get backlinks and thus boost your website's PageRank. However, one needs to be very careful when exchanging links with other webmasters.

Link Exchange - What is it?
For those who do not know, link exchange is when two webmasters decided to put each other's website's link on their own websites. This is a common type of link exchange known as two way link exchange. The second type of link exchange is known as three way link exchange. In such a link exchange, a webmaster places his website A's link on the other webmaster's website B. In return, website A's webmaster places webmaster B's link on his website C. Thus, there are a total of three websites involved.

5 steps you should take before exchanging links

1. Carefully check the content of the website - You always want to exchange links with only quality websites that are regularly updated. Make sure that the content is interesting. Also, you do not want to exchange links with sites that contain adult material (and other content that Google does not like).
   
2. Check the website's PageRank - While content is important, a lot of webmasters also consider PageRank before exchanging links. Why? Just so that they can get a nice backlink for their site and thus boost its PageRank.
3. Verify the PageRank - If you consider PageRank as a major factor then I strongly suggest that you verify the website's PageRank. There are several ways to generate a false PageRank and you need to know how to detect fake PageRank.
   
4. Check if the website is a link farm - A lot of webmasters just create websites and then try to put as many links as possible on their website. Such sites with numerous irrelevant links are considered as link farms and linking to such sites can hurt your website's PageRank.
5. Check where your link will be placed - You don't want your link to be placed somewhere in the corner at the bottom of the page where no one will see it. Your link should be placed in a proper place where the visitors can easily see it.

Finally, I would like to say that sometimes you should not care about PageRank very much when exchanging links. PageRank is a good factor but it is never permanent. A website that has a PageRank of 6 today can completely lose it in the next update. Thus, try to get backlinks from websites with relevant and interesting content as well.

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Posted by Dan at SEO and Blogging Tips.
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