As important as links are.... I would rather have my link on a relevant page

links, link exchange, reciprocal links

[EyeDesign]

.....I would rather have my links sitting on a page that is relevant to my information than a link just tossed into a directory or "link farm", does that make sense?

If I have a link on a digital camera site, it will point to my digital cameras, and of course the site I exchanged with would have their link on a respective page. Is this old news or just too much work for either partner? to me it would be better, any suggestions, ideas?

[seoindia]

Yeh definately thats a better idea than to get penalized by doing excessive link exchanges...

[Matt Probert]

Of course the link on a related page is of far more use to readers following the trail than links in great farms solely for the purpose of trying to con search engines.

Let's say I have an article about digital photography on a web site, and at the end of the article I have external links to other sites about digital cameras, image manipulation and the like. These links will all be relevant to people reading the original article, and they are likely to be happy both with me for providing the links, and the links themselves.

Matt

[Crush]

pffft. I put links everywhere and works fine. DO not give a monkeys about the users as the links are buried on my links pages anyway. Although we do put links in the relevant category which should help for theming.

[martinibuster]

It's a good way of doing it but most people aren't going to do that because it's an imperfect world. Most people hate putting an outgoing link without burying their links pages or shoving the link through a cgi-bin so that it doesn't get counted. People are out to hoard PR. Put your helmet on and watch your back when exchanging links. It's dirty out there.

[Soren]

It takes more work to find trading partners willing to do this on sub-pages of their sites, but well worth the effort. Personally I would take "1" sub-page link in place of 20+ links on "links" pages. At the very least find people to trade with where their resource pages are themed.

It also depends if you are in it for the long haul. If you have a throwaway domain and just want to rank quicky disregard my comments ;)

[EyeDesign]

I won't put any more links on my links page. I think it is well worth the effort to get targeted traffic. I have seen it help a great deal. People are coming to my site with my site in mind, that's the pay off. If they buy, that's the plus. If not, it was still worth it and maybe they sign up for email list.

Either way, as dirty as the "game" is, I would rather just junk all my links and not be a part of it. I have a hard enough time keeping my site updating with all of my products, I don't have time to worry about "link farms". Even if it won't help me in the search engines, some how the customers are still coming and with very little advertising to boot.

Thanks for everyone's input, let's keep this thread going with personal experiences, tips, hints, secrets, news and the like.

[ken_b]

Links pages that are hard, if not almost impossible to find, are hardly worth the effort, at least if traffic is part of the equation.

I try to make it easy to find them by placing prominent links on my other pages.

Now I'm considering going beyond that and starting related links lists on my main pages ending the list with a ... more resources link to the actual links page.

I haven't done that much yet,but it seems like it would be good for my visitors.

What I haven't sorted out yet is which links to place on the main pages. Maybe a rotating selection?

Any suggestions?