What about "link partners" services?

They say they are not "link farms", but are they?

[xerxes]

I see a service being offered for free which allows you to browse to the category of your choice and select link partners.

Although they state that they are not a "link farm", are they indeed a link farm? I have someone requesting to link to my sites who uses this link service and I fear to link to his site because of this.

Any opinions on this, please? Our sites are very well placed and I cannot risk any Google penalty. Thank you very much for any input!

[Clever]

I think this site isnīt a link farm,
but it produces 'link farms' on much of different sites.

Especially the link sites of many members are very similar and
it could be seen as 'bad neighbourhood' in future.
Many Members are changing links with nearly every other site.

Don't waste your time and don't risk your site.

- no Linktrade sites -
Thats my opinion.

[xerxes]

Thanks, Clever, I will follow your suggestion. I guess what we have to do is check out very carefully the links pages of the sites proposing links. Thanks again! Much appreciated. Also I have to study up in this particular forum, which I had not been doing...

[jilla]

I was also wondering about them. IT seems when reading the site that to be listed there you may need to join link managers which is their sister site and involves some easy automation...

I too am wondering what about just picking 2 sites to link to and vice versa... It seems that the link pages do look unique and not cookie cutter and that if I don't myself get listed on the linkpartners directory site that shows all the sites involved in the exchange but just individually email webmasters who have relevant sites it is less risky.
Is that a false conclusion? (I think people say that about zeus collective too- that you can just email a few people from there but not list yourself in their database..)

[dougs]

If you are going to get the links from link traders why not just goto DMOZ, find your category and start emailing the sites.....then do link traders, then do all the sites that link to your competitors, then do all the sites that link to all the sites that want to link to you, you will have lots after doing the first lot.

You will end up with links from everywhere and any type of pattern will just vanish.

But please donīt just build a links page, have a parters section and subdivide everything into suitable areas.. It will give you many more pages for your site...great content, plus look so moregeuine and want people to link to you.

Doug

[DarkFriend]

I've used Linkpartners.com to search for new link swap partners, and it has worked well for me. There's nothing wrong with this service, its simply a categorized free listing of websites that engage in link swaps with other websites. Plain and simple. There's no automation involved, and each website listed is manually approved by a human editor (like DMOZ) so there's not a bunch of junky websites listed. There's no possible way for Google to even know you are using this service, since you are simply browsing the directory and going directly to other websites to find email addresses and ask for link swaps.