Link Exchange Program

Is it going to help or hinder my site

[Michael Anthony]

I'm considering joining the Links4Trade program. Having spent my first year as a webmaster buying traffic through PPC and pop up campaigns, I've just spent the last three weeks designing a new improved site to try and grab some free traffic by good SERPS.

One of the things that I decided early on from competitor analysis was that I needed loads of inbound links, so I went to Link4strade, which seemed like a great idea to me.

However, my site is a PR5 and ranks around 500,000 in Alexa, and all the links that I've received are lower. Additionally, I'm concerned that Google and some other engines will penalise my membership.

Does anyone here have any experience or comments to help me?

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 2:27 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2003]
[edit reason] Changed title, revised post for consistency [/edit]

[rogerd]

I haven't studied the techniques used by the site in question, though they claim not to be a link farm. Link farms are very high risk, and usually consist of sets of links or link pages distributed to member sites. Google considers this an artificial linking strategy and a threat to its algorithm, and bans link farm sites.

My guess is that if Google could identify your site as a participant, you would have a problem. If there are no telltale code segments or links, and the links are random and/or topically appropriate, you might be relatively safe. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past Google's PhDs to develop a way of finding a large mass of artificially cross-linked sites, even if all sites didn't contain all links.

I'd recommend studying this carefully and being cautious. Be sure you have a good understanding of how this works, and that you aren't becoming part of a tightly crosslinked network.

[Marcia]

They're all on numerical subdomains. There are over 4 thousand of those, about a year and a half ago there were well over ten thousand of them.

Check allinurl: at Google for yourself. Click on some of them, opening in a new window. Click on a number of the links in the navigation on some - notice the topics and check the PR on the sites as well as what's showing up in their backlinks.

I've never yet seen one in backlinks for a site, ever, for any site. Do they add value to site users or bring targeted traffic, or is the purpose for link popularity? How related are underwear, viagra, casinos and auto parts?

How fond are search engines of wildcard domains?