From all the linking strategies known to the online entrepreneur, link exchange seems to be the most controversial. There are pros and cons, ups and downs, incessant debates and so on. What’s happening here? What is wrong with link exchanging?

One or two years ago reciprocal linking used to be the most effective technique to bring higher rankings and higher PageRanks. Today this is the most avoided technique. People prefer to approach bloggers to get contextual links, they join niche related forums and newsgroups and use different “signatures” to get other inbound links, they go into article marketing although, sadly, the Web is already flooded with low quality articles and it’s becoming harder and harder to find a good quality piece of writing online.

In the not so far past the world of linking look different. It was a great pleasure to receive a link exchange request from another Webmaster. It was a proof that someone else was actually reading the pages of a certain website and wanted to exchange a link based primarily on the quality of the content and then on the ranking link exchanging might bring.

Today most link exchange requests are automated. SEO Elite, and other link exchange software make this possible. And the problem is that the search engines don’t like this SEO technique anymore, because of incessant abuses aimed to artificially inflating PR and SE rankings for the sites requesting a link exchange.

Such sites do link back to your site, but sadly the page on which they place your link has no value, being home for other irrelevant, often non-related links, buried among other similar pages and too often being a part of what SEOs call “a link farm”. This will bring you nothing: no SE rankings, no link juice, not even visitors. On a site stuffed with thousands of links do you really believe that users will start digging to find yours? Why should they, when it’s way easier to type into the Google query box some relevant keywords and find the info that they actually need?

Technically the search engines will not punish your site for having a link from a link farm. But they would punish your site if you link to “bad neighbors”. With automated linking processes it is hard to check the real quality of a website. So, no matter what you hear, no matter what you read about the “magic” of such software, please don’t use them! For the good of your website!

There is now a new linking trend: three-way linking. Site A requests a link from site B and provides, in exchange a link on site C. Basically: B links to A and C links to B, creating a chain of “one-way” links, instead of reciprocal links. Nothing wrong with the principle, except that the technique is meant to fool the search engines and to artificially inflate rankings for site A, because site C is generally a link farm or a low quality site that has nothing to lose anyway.

So getting quality links back to your site is a challenge in the actual SEO context. But if you have a good quality site, with lots of giveaways, valuable ebooks, high rated software, special promotions, interactive online applications and so on, people might decide to link to you without even asking. Become the resource and you’ll be treated like a resource. And there is still nothing wrong to exchange links, just make sure, if you do it, that the site you are linking to is a related resource, more valuable for your visitors than for the search engines. Place the link to the other site in a visible place, to send some traffic to your link partner as well, and ask your link partner to do the same for you.