Are People Abandoning Link Exchanges?

Is the "I will link to you if you link to me" game over?

[SEO practioner]

With all of what happened with the Florida update, I'd like to know if people are still linking to each other as much as before, or is this a thing of the past?

Are any of you guys removing your links pages? I've read in some forums that many people have removed them, since Google will probably abandon that anyway, if it's not done already.

When you think about it, the whole thing didn't make that much sense anyway.

Google will rank a site higher if its content is relevant to another site and it links to it- Now THAT makes a whole lot of sense. Personally, I think that the old "I will link to you if you link to me" game is pretty much all over...

Your toughts anybody?

[Kirby]

Shouldn't be.

[europeforvisitors]

I responded to the point that 1 of 1000 web publishers dont even know about the Florida update. This I find hard to believe. In several industries with a lot of non-pros, they do know that things are different with Google. They dont know why, but hear things about filters and links, so many are dropping links or asking for AT to be changed.

Keep in mind, too, that many (most?) sites aren't in the business of selling widgets or services via the Web. They don't track their positions for specific keywords or keyphrases as compulsively as owners of affiliate or sites do. (Somehow I can't see a professor of colonial American history monitoring Google to see if he's in the #1 or #2 position for "Paul Revere academic papers" on any given day.) I don't know what percentage of the Web is devoted to e-commerce, but I suspect it's much smaller than the percentage of Webmaster World members who earn a livelihood from the Web.

[synergy]

...so many are dropping links...

I dropped links that were irrelevant to my site. Kept the ones that were. Think themes.

[webdude]

My site sells widgets and I thank the almighty for my recip links. Before Florida, 70% of my traffic was from the G. Now since I have gone from #1 to #18 for kw1 kw2 out of 180,200 results, 80% of my traffic is coming from the recip links. Especially 2 links that are fairly high traffic sites. If it was not for them, I would be dead in the water.

[lorenzinho2]

I dropped links that were irrelevant to my site. Kept the ones that were. Think themes.

I think this nails it. I'm more inclined to participate in link exchanges post florida - as long as they are clearly and directly related to my site.

Post florida and on -IN, I am coming up as a top 5 result for a 2M plus search results term, based solely on the anchor text of my outbound links. Sadly those particular terms don't help me, as I am not directly in that business.

Who knows if this knob will be readjusted - but all signs at the moment indicate that both relevant outgoing and incoming links are critical.

My personal theory is that Google is emphasizing anchor text of outbound links with the express purpose of encouraging sites to link only to sites that are relevant to themselves, as not to incent the purchase of backlinks from unrelated sites - in other words, there is no way to stop the purchase of backlinks / pr, but Google can at least ensure that they are relevant.

[mbn123]

I posted somethihg on links twice but it never showed up on here so i guess i will post now.

I have been working on links for eight months and they just now showed up. We are talking about a lot of links. Some are not so relevant.

However, the top sites under my keywords have less links, same PR and their links are terrible. Guestbooks and whatnot. But they are ranking well and me ,well I cant even find my sites.

So either google is totally screwed up or playing favorites or have no friggin idea what they are doing.

thanks

[nippi]

All sites of mine that improved through florida have large link exchanges. I use software that monthly

Checks links pages have less than 100 links
Can be navigated to from home page
Have keyword, title and description tags
More than 1k less than 100k in size.
Link and home page remain live, and link remainss in place

I manually check link pages have at least google pr3(can't work out an automated way fo doing that) And steer clear of link farm like structures.

I create a new page for each link category, which bulks up the site size immensly. Each of my linsk pages has relevant meta tags and titles.

In most cases, I ONLY do recip links.

Sites are top 10 ranked in competitive criteria.

[kiril]

My approach is to decouple my own linking choices from my requests for others to link to me. If an exchange of links makes sense thematically, then we do it. On the other hand, there are times when my site wouldn't belong on the link pages of a site that I link to or vice versa. In these cases, I'm willing to request or to provide a one-way transaction. I run a small nonprofit site, so this approach may not be right for all cases, but it has served me extremely well (SERP position and PR) in the last six months.

[paul12345]

Related to the Florida update, I have one advetiser who's commercial site sells widgets. I had noticed that historically they had always done well with the serps. After Florida their pages still had high rankings where other commercial sites seemed to disappear altogether.
These people have an "affiliate" program where anyone who wants can post a banner ad for this company's widgets on their website in hopes of generating a click through which in turn generates a sale and gets the referer some comission.
While evaluating the specifics of this widgets manufacturer's affiliates program I thought the program and the list of affiliates was incredibly lame. Truely lame. I would have been embarrassed to offer it or participate in it.
In hind sight the affilate program, for the mere cost of paying very small comission on sales (an event which very well may never happen), had generated a series of inbound links to this widget manufacturer and as I said earlier, they survived Florida just fine where other commercial just fell out of sight.

[zgb999]

nippi
Do you use a standard software for that or do you have a script of your own?