Our clients continually ask what they should do about email requests to exchange links with another website in a similar area of business. Below is an example of one of these such emails.

It is worth saving these linkage requests but it also should be noted that generally only one or two out of every 10 are worth bothering with. If the request is to exchanges links with a website totally unrelated to your website you might as well just delete it. I will explain why later.

Ordinarily trading links with a .org website (like the example shown above) is a good idea. But not all .org's are created equal. This one in particular when you look at the site is nothing more than a simple content site loaded up with a list of outbound links and functions to generate pay-per-click ad revenue for the owner. These types of sites can be deemed as a link-farm and the danger with trading links with a link-farm is that Google generally deems these as unethical and they can potentially penalize you or even worse "blacklist" your site. I am not saying this site is a link-farm but from looking at it there is a real danger that Google could deem it as a link-farm sometime in the future.

Also it is important to note that not all inbound back links (IBLs) to a particular site are equal in value. Below illustrates this. PR equals Google's page rank system. A PR of 10 is the largest and best rank. Thus you can see that Ekamo.org has the highest number of IBLs but has a relatively low PR and thus this signifies it has alot of sites linking to it of very low value.

http://www.ekamo.org

PR = 2
ekamo.org = 2,800 IBLs

http://www.wastecollection.com

PR = 2
wastecollection.com = 1,640 IBLs

http://www.water-energy-savings.com

PR = 0
water-energy-savings.com = 41 IBLs

Our our corporate site which, embarrassingly we have not touched in more than two years, has a higher PR with less links.

http://www.slickrockweb.com

PR = 3
slickrockweb.com = 1,370 IBLs

One of our clients, Journey's End Resort, has an even higher PR with less links.

http://www.journeysendresort.com

PR = 4
journeysendresort.com = 1,580

This hopefully illustrates that point that not all links are created equal and thus just because a site has alot of IBLs does not mean it could be a good link exchange partner for your own corporate site.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."