mil2k - 10:18 am on Apr 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Link development work can be compared these days to cold calling. Although cold calling is a marketing initiative and helps directly in sales, link building helps indirectly (helps in increasing search traffic).

First off, the above are poor metrics for quality. All of your above metrics have zero, absolutely nothing to do with quality. So your project was doomed from the beginning.

This is one of the occasions where I have to agree with MB. One of the biggest mistake outsourcers make while defining Quality website is put up a minimum qualifying PR for linking to other website.

Lets look at some numbers (these are just based on our internal experience) :-

1) An average link researcher can research and find 40 links in a day. The work includes finding links, uploading them on your website, sending link request to the other website, do a few followups on previous links and delete old links which did not respond. This is assuming this site has not done extensive link campaign before. If it has, then the number of links found in a day can be less (because then sites have to be compared with previous database of sites already approached and over a period of time, number of related sites left for link exchange decreases).

2) Out of these 40 links, if the site is not PR 0 then there is a conversion rate of 10 to 15 %. This ratio goes down is the link exchange is three way.

3) Link exchange has become a menace these days and hence lot of people complaint about spam. This is one of the reasons your link exchange company used your name while doing link exchange. If they used their own name for each of their clients, their web host would most certainly take their website down.

4) Using above metrics you get roughly 880 link requests in a month (22 working days approximately 175 working man hours). The company will charge you based on what their man hour rates are.

So you are looking at about 110 to 130 reciprocal links in a month. Now you add your criteria for minimum PR and your conversion rate decreases. Any additional criteria will bring down conversion rate.

However, there are many vendors in market who have already developed a network and are ready to provide you quotes on per link basis. Since they have contacts in place, they dont need to spend time in research or reminder link requests. I once heard about a company in south america which charged $2.5 per reciprocal link. The advantage is cost. The disadvantage is that they are most probably selling it to hundreds if not thousands of people. It might or might not work long term.

I would only recommend something like this to a competitor who had pissed me off at some point. In fact, I have a competitor who used an outfit from India.

I am not sure if I understand you correctly. But if you are implying that companies from India either cannot understand SEO/ SEM/ Link building then I think you are mistaken. Companies can be good/ bad /worse irrespective of their geography.