How to Avoid Bad Link Exchanges and Become a Backlink Pro

Gaining Backlinks for your website can be a draggy subject when doing it yourself. After a hard day's work, you often have to sit down on the computer for hours, just to find out what sites to check and which webmasters to write, in hopes of getting a backlink somehow. Often times, you don't get a response, or get a complete useless link back because you missed out on an important factor: The link quality. Yes, the quality of your link is crucial, and while you had 2-3 e-mail exchanges with some webmasters for a link-exchange, you may have done the work for nothing. This is also important to know, because many webmasters claim they know, but don't, or simply want to gain an unfair advantage due to your lack of backlink know-how. Now, here are some things to look out for in your next link exchange:

Link Pages Page Rank

Just because the website offering you a link has a Page Rank of 5, doesn't mean the Page Rank of the page your link will be on is the same. Remember, Google ranks the pages, not complete websites, so you want to make sure that your link is placed wisely. If the link is placed on the sites directory, partner page or links page doesn't matter, as long as these rules apply:

• The page your link will be on is linked from the Index Page of that website (or highest PR'd page)
• The page is cached
• The page does not have hundreds of outgoing links

What good is the links page if it doesn't have a high PR or is linked to by a high PR? Also make sure that the page is cached. Webmasters do use tricks to deceive, especially when linking to a potential competitor (happens often in link exchanges), where they link to the links page with a 'nofollow' or block the page with its robots.txt. Yes, very dark indeed. Also, a page with a lot of outgoing links makes yours worthless, as you would have to split the page rank with the other backlinks on that page.

Type of Exchange

One mistake many people do is fall for a 2-way link exchange, where one site would point to the other and the other points back. This is a useless trade, unless one person is aware of the other ones flaw and uses one of the above blackhat techniques. Google disregarded such links-exchanges, as this was a popular technique in the past when search engine optimization got popular and too many people were doing it. Now, you are limited to one-way backlinks and or 3-way, 4-way exchanges. There are more blackhat techniques out there that you should look out for, especially when getting an e-mail such as this: "My name is -classified- and I was wondering if you are interested in exchange links, I'll place your link on my sites exactly here: website(dot)net PR5 website(dot)com PR3 website(dot)com If you agree please send me your site details: Title: Url: I'll place your link in less than 24 hours, then I'll send you an email with my info." The above type of link exchange uses a technique known as URL cloaking, which will be explained in another post.