Scrappy (Full of fighting spirit) Budget Link Exchange

Link exchange on a budget

[Komodo_Tale]

As the minion of a small business owner with a budget that weighs almost as much as virtual reality does, what suggestions do you have for link exchange strategies and tools?

I am particulaly interested in what free or low cost tools you have experienced that can help automate the process and if you would actually reccomend any of them.

Thanks for helping a newbie.

Tom S.
Seattle, WA

[spaceylacie]

Your site could be penalized for using an automated link exchange program. Your better off doing it the old fashioned way, in my opinion. Start your links page with sites that you think your visitors will enjoy, then email those site owners to let them know you've linked to them, and ask for a link back. I also ask them if they want to change anything about the listing(title, description) and to let me know if they prefer not to be listed at all.

This is a completely free way to establish link exchanges.

[jschmitz]

As a Small biz owner with a startup and a virtual budget, I have built my links one by one, by searching competitors link ratings, and then submitting/requesting/exchanging links with those pages.

Manual, yes, but it works!

j

[Crush]

Komodo_Tale. Do not listen to the last 2 people.

Crawl for links forms

like links.php
crawl for emails and bulk send. You can find many programs on the internet that do this.
crawl your competions backlinks on yahoo ( it shows the most) and mail the sites.

If you do it like the above 2 suggested you will end up with a virtual income too as you will spend all your time looking for links.

[Komodo_Tale]

Thanks for the replies so far.

In a perfect world I would do this one by one and all by hand, but this is not a perfect world. I don't have that kind of time available.

I also know that if I fully automate the system I'll get penalized, as I should.

According to past forum reports, Google's representatives have said that using link tools is okay -- and smart -- as long as it is done in a targeted and contextual manner. That's exactly what I intend to do, and I'm looking for start-up tools to accomplish it.

Tom S.
Seattle, WA

[Crush]

"I'll get penalized"

Only if you use something like webpositiongold which automatically queries google.

Just do not use automated software that is going to give your website away.

send out link requests without your url and only the interested will reply. Then you can let them know what your site is

[spaceylacie]

"a link is a link" is not true, at least not long term, or in my experience(about 8 years). I have pages with just one quality link exchange, done manually. These pages rank higher than other pages where every nearly every site is linked back. Instead of spending my time getting 50 or 100 links back, I'd rather work on getting one quality link exchange.

I still don't agree with the past couple posters. Once you get the links, you have to keep up with them! That takes way more time than initially establishing them. Even programs that check for 404 errors etc., don't always work. The site could have been sold to a bad neighborhood, causing your site problems in the long run. Your automated link checker won't always catch this.

[Crush]

""a link is a link" is not true, at least not long term, or in my experience(about 8 years)."

Try getting to #1 for "london hotels" "paris hotels" every site there has 2000+ links. You need 3500 to be trhe man!

Depends where you play. I could crush your serps with recips in no time at all if you have 100 links.

[spaceylacie]

The site listed directly below my site in today's Google SERP has 2130 back links(that site has #2 listing), my site has 393 back links and is ranked #1, the number 3 site has only 83(a popular national site-company established before the Internet even existed), #4-10 all have links in the thousands. And, I'm talking about a keyword here, not a key phrase. The 3 of us vie for the #1 spot, my site has prevailed about 90% of the time in the past 4 years(always different sites that I'm competing with).

My additional pages are ranked similar, other sites have far more links and a much lower ranking. I manually establish link exchanges, that is the difference.

[spaceylacie]

By the way, the #3 site listed under my keyword keeps re-directing their homepage, so the back links # is not very accurate, they are being penalized for the re-directs, causing my site to rise above them.