If you have been in Online marketing for any amount of time you know that backlink building can give a huge boost to your business. And in order to build up the quantity of backlinks many online marketers would trade links with other websites. But with all the modifications that Google has made through the years, is this still considered a good marketing method? Here we are talking about trading links to see if it’s still worth it.

Let me start off by explaining what a backlink is, a backlink is a url that is on one website that points to another website. For the most part you’ll find that the search engines count these kinds of backlinks as a popularity vote for your website. So basically the more backlinks you have pointing to your website the higher your website will rank in the search engines. But one thing you should remember is that every backlink that is created has a different value in the search engine eyes. Let’s just say that you have a web link on a Internet site that has a page rank of 3, if the backlink is on the home page of that site you’ll find that it has more value than if the link is found on a sub page of that site. In order to determine the importance of the backlink you need to look at the page the link is on, rather than what the page rank of the home page is, even though the home page rank will still help a little.

When men and women trade backlinks with other websites normally those other websites have a different web page on their site where they place the link for your website. So you are not obtaining the same results from that backlink, that you would from the home page of that site. Also these link pages can end up with hundreds or even thousands of other links directed to other sites. Google doesn’t like to see this type of thing so obviously these links aren’t really counted.

Google additionally gives more power to one way links than they offer to websites that trade links. Just so you realize, a one way link is just what it sounds like, you receive a link from a site but you don’t need to link back to them. Google wants to see one way backlinks and they will in addition reward your site when they see these kinds of backlinks. Something else you will need to be cautious of is trading links with websites that Google doesn’t like as this may hurt the reputation of your website. Of course it is not your objective to have Google hate you, nevertheless it can happen if you trade backlinks with the wrong websites.

To be honest there are advantages to trading links with good websites, if the site is considered to be an authority site by Google and if the web page where your backlink is possesses good traffic on it. On the other hand when you wind up on a deep web page of that website you must also understand that there is a chance that Google won’t even index that web page because it is simply full of links. The issue is that most websites that trade links actually have some sort of links page that doesn’t get indexed. In short you will find just a few ways to make link exchanging work in your favor and it can be extremely time intensive to complete them, however you can find other ways to build one way links.

Keep in mind many people understand the importance of backlinks for their search engine optimization but it is critical to obtain links from the greatest sources.

Chasse Cooper has been involved with SEO marketing and reputation management services for several years now. He offers information and suggestions to small establishments