Exchanging links with other sites is a waste of time.

After doing alot of link exchanges, I have now discovered that exchanging links is just wasting my time.

Exchanging links with other sites do help some webmasters, but then don't help others.

I have exchanged links with so many site only to find out that about a quarter of sites don't even bother adding your link to their site.

I also receive emails from time to time saying that they can no longer see their link on my site, which means I have to then search for the link and reply to their email, which wastes alot more of my time.

Due to all this I have now finished exchanging links with alot of sites unless they link to me first and also add their link to my sites theirselfs.

I find that writing articles is alot more better than this as you don't have to link back to the sites and if your article is of quality then you will recieve alot of links back to your site.

It does depend on your market and the quality of your content. A "Product Price Comparison Directory" contains poor or no content - why should anyone link to that?

I simply have links section and I add a links only if the site that are good and I word an email to say that they should list my site only if it meats their standard.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. But I have exchange links on 4 of my sites and find it a waste of time. I find it alot better writing my own articles and also alot quicker getting links that way.

Also, I don't know if you have taken a look at my Products Price Comparison Directory, but anyway it is a new section on my site and wasn't there when I was doing link exchanges. You will find that the site that the Products Price Comparison directory is on also has a free reprint categorized articles directory, a free to play categorized games directory, a categorized web directory, plus more.

Exchanging links is not a total waste of time as they do help. But I find that write articles with a few of my sites links contained within them produce better results.

i think your just visiting too many link farms. Built up a small number of high quality links and put them on the bottom of your homepage, tell him to do the same. Both parties should be happy.

We have created 200 subdomains for top destinations and been working on exchanging links for those. So you can imagine how much work that is. Saying that, the little work that I have managed to do as really shown good results. Visitors are finding our pages through SE's now and thus saving money (or just getting more visitors.)

The initial work is what counts. As soon as people can start to find your link pages and you have an automated system, all you need to do is edit out the crap.

You might want to try a reciprocal link management script to facilitate the addition of new links and deletion of link partners who stop linking to you. Using Swapware, a free script, I get around two to three partners a day without having to do any manual coding at all. Of course, I check to see that the requests are not from a link farm before approving them. See my website (sig below) if you want to see the script in action.