Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Up to sometime last year, 2 to 5 out of every 10 sites contacted would do agree to do it. Now I find that sometimes not one out of 30 or 50 sites contacted in an evening will go for it.
I am asking politely.
Are people just getting lazy? Or is there some other reason why they won't add or trade links?
(5%) 1. They are for exchanging links between their obscure low-PR site and my super-popular high-PR site.
(94%) 2. They are obviously cookie-cutter spam from link-building software. (It's pretty easy to tell when you get the exact same email sent to multiple addresses, with the destination the only difference).
(1%) 3. Someone who makes something I sell through an affiliate link that wants me to link to them on that specific page because they have more info on the item.
I politely refuse #1 all together once per week (I don't have a directory site and don't link to all that many other websites, especially on my home page).
I ignore/delete all of #2. If their email looks like spam and they are using an automated recip. link-checker, I'm pretty sure I don't want to link to them, since they are likely to turn into a bad neighborhood or into using deceptive linking practices.
I consider #3 to see if it would actually be useful to my readers, but lean towards linking to them if they really are the publisher/manufacturer/etc...
I don't think I have EVER gotten an unsolicited email from someone with a comparable site requesting a link exchange. About the closest I've come is when I requested a link from a directory and the directory owner liked my site so much that they proposed a different set of link exchanges.
That may be because of the markets my sites are in. It also may be that webmasters have fallen into link-request fatigue and treat them as close to spam, since many of them are nowadays.
Are people just getting lazy? Or is there some other reason why they won't add or trade links
Both.
I'll give you the lazy side first. I've this one site that has been around for a while and after it's last overhaul, it's really quite beautiful. I put a lot of work into getting the link directory set up and the site attracts a lot of people that want to link to it. However, due to some management controversies that turned into legal issues, I was ordered to quit working on the site. So I did. Yet still, 15 to 20 new sites link to this site every month and solicit reciprocal links. My point being that once a site crosses a certain point in traffic, it continues to grow in links without any effort from the linkmaster.
2nd, a lot of people only want to link to certain things, that have some particular relavance, and some are against it. I wanted to link one perfume site to another perfume site, but the webmaster there said that as a rule they did would not link to any other site that sold perfume. They sold single bottles only. My site only sold perfume to resellers, in bulk. When I tried to enlighten the webmaster, she hung up on me, as far as she was concerned, I was bad news for her site and she wanted nothing to do with me.
Another person I've exchanged links with only exchanges links with his direct competitors. This is going a bit overboard on the relevancy issue. I don't mind linking with my direct competitors, but I find most people won't do this at all, so I do not put much effort into pursuing such.
Plus, there's all this talk now about Google (and maybe other engines) recognizing reciprocal linking as an artificial method of boosting relevance. I think a lot of this talk is put forward by webmasters who use this story as a reason not to launch a full-blown linking campaign (out of laziness), but maybe they're right. It doesn't explain why my site still has top ranks, but it sounds resonable.
