Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I understand that link development is still a nessesary tool but like martinibuster and many others have been saying, we dont need to send out hundreds of link requests a day.
So do you need a few links in the beginning to get out of the sandbox and to get indexed? Then thats it? Just keep developing material?
I want to see other peoples views on this.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:22 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] Heh. Removed Blog Link. :o [/edit]
Link development is dead. Long live the development of links.
I wanted to make a distinction between the development of links and what we typically think of as Link Development.
It's interesting the way Matt has been going on about the attainment of links by publishing information or offering something of value that will motivate websites to link to you.
This leads to a conversation about content, specifically, to finding a reliable definition of content. Does having good sales copy qualify as content?
A question that is very connected to this is, is it possible to have a lead generation website that is also useful to web visitors?
Let's face it, many of us here are generating leads or converting sales. But that's not what the search engines generally define as useful. So the challenge is to incorporate both aspects to please the search engines (and create a site worthy of being called a "resource," thereby making it easier to attract one way inbound links), as well as helping yourself earn a living.
Buying defunct websites, starting blogs, paying people to link to you, etc. is the other side of the coin, but it's the same coin nonetheless.
All that said, I'm not averse to exchanging links with another website. Just consider what can and cannot pass a handcheck.
Your time would be much better spent just concentrating on making your site a good destination. You want your site to be as sticky as possible, or at least get return visitors.
Link-exchanges do nothing for Google, as far as I can tell, but may help with MSN and Yahoo! to a certain extent. If you have a link-worthy site, people will link to you, and if they aren't then that should tell you something. Also, consider this: if another site is looking to enter into a link-exchange, they are probably not link-worthy either and that is why they are looking for exchange arrangements. Then ask yourself, why you would want to link to a site such as that. In the long run exchanges will not do you much good, and may even harm you.
In my opinion linking is valuable if its a site wide endeavour where you link to other sites where its valuable to your visitors and have other people link to your site pages where it would be beneficial to theirs.
Hundred of exchanges; no. Targeted quality exchanges; yes.
