Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Is manual link exchange a dying trend?

Monday, April 12th, 2010

The idea for Automatic Backlinks was born out of frustration trying to manually find link partners.

At the time we were working for a client trying to get their site ranked for particular keywords. Even though we were outsourcing the work to India it was painfully slow and painfully obvious that the effort put in was nowhere worth the reward: a reciprocal PageRank 0 link inside someone’s link directory.

The problems with manual link exchange are manifold:

  • Reciprocal links are largely ignored by Google (which results in some people resorting to complicated 3 way link schemes)
  • You need to monitor that your link partner keeps his end of the bargain
  • You almost have to resort to spam in order to find link partners
  • It is extremely time consuming
  • 99% of all links are PageRank 0 and often considered bad link neighbourhoods

These problems sparked the idea for Automatic Backlinks which solves all of these issues and it seems that Web Masters are realising this as well.

A quick comparison on Google trends shows that searches for “link exchange” are in decline and that searches for “backlinks” are increasing. In fact “backlinks” is now searched for more than “link exchange”. I believe the decline for “link exchange” shows that Web Masters and SEO professionals are realising that traditional manual link exchange simply does not work, but people realise that they need to get “backlinks” somehow if they want to rank so they are now searching for that instead.

Graph showing the decline of link exchange and the increase in backlinks on Google Trends

We of course welcome this change as we provide what we believe to be the best platform for getting relevant, quality backlinks – all 100% free and automatic. We only provide PageRank 1 or above backlinks so you know that there will be no bad link neighbourhoods. Should you lose a backlink because someone shuts down their site – we will provide you with a different link from one of our more than 10,000 websites automatically.

It is no wonder manual link exchange is a dying trend.