Hello All,
I've done some basic white hat seo/sem to my website, and have stumbled across some link exchange opportunities within my genre of business. The link exchange opportunities are with competitors though, and I'm not sure why they are offering such, but that's another question for another time. My questions at hand is, "Can I set up a second site, which would be a link directory site for my genre of business, to see if those link exchange opps that I mentioned would go for me putting my main site link on their site, while I put their link on my second site? Do you think they'd go for this?" This would avoid me having to put a competitor's link on my main site. I know it'd be fine to setup a second site for this purpose. I'm wondering if competitors would go for this???
Sincerely,
Brian

Yes as long you obtain a good page rank for your second site directory. This is called three way and it has been successful for many. It is better to avoid direct linking with direct competitor.

Best,

Pardon my lengthy response but I want to make sure you are making an educated decision.

#1 - Link popularity is critical to ranking well in the search engines. If you do not believe this just go to Google and search for any popular keyword. Take the top 20 sites and you will see that there is a strong correlation between the sites with higher quantity & quality of backlinks ranking above sites that dont have quantity & quality. If you are serious about ranking high in google for competitive keywordss you should get serious about your link building.

#2 - Link popularity calculations take into account how much link juice flows into a page & how much flows out of it. In other words there is less link benefit in participating in triangle, reciprocal and other similar linking strategies. I'm not saying dont do it since any link help is good but ideally you should try to develop one way links.

#3 - When trading links with others be careful that you are not being cheated. There are many, many ways to make it appear you are trading links but to secretly withhold the link juice. The most common ways to do this are using nofollow tags, javascript or cloaking. There are alot sneakier ways but I would rather not mention them.

#4 - Launching a stand alone link directory is probably not a good idea. It will not be easy to get it the same pagerank since pagerank is based on link popularity and people are less likely to link to a link directory. It will also spread your limited seo efforts across two sites instead of focusing on one really good site.

#5 - A specific idea that might help you, is to seek out businesses that are not direct competitors. Maybe they do the same thing as you but you are only serve NYC and they only serve Miami. You are still related but not a threat to each other. You can also target related businesses. If you sell widgets then contact the widget repair websites or the widget carrying case business.

Good Luck!

@goodroi
Thanks for the reply. Point 5 was a good point, as were the others too.

#4 - Launching a stand alone link directory is probably not a good idea. It will not be easy to get it the same pagerank since pagerank is based on link popularity and people are less likely to link to a link directory. It will also spread your limited seo efforts across two sites instead of focusing on one really good site.

In regards to point #4, I was thinking that the directory site would just be for the purpose of forming a triangle with the link exchange opps that I ran across. These are not ideal opps, rather "something is better than nothing opps". Therefore I didn't plan on seo/sem'ing it, rather just keeping it live and not really caring about the page rank. Of course that means the site wouldn't have much link juice punch to it, but it would be better than nothing, because I'm not willing to clutter my site with competitor's links.

Thoughts?

if you can find someone that is willing to give you a PR 4 link in exchange for you giving them a PR 1 link then you should consider yourself very, very lucky. personally i would not expect to find that many webmasters who are ignorant or silly enough to agree to that.

FYI, there are tons of directories that include a link directory along with anchor text and many do this as a part of promotion (for 3 way links). Link directory popularity increases not only through link juice. It also depends the way the directory is maintained and visitor’s behavior to the directory.

@goodroi
Thanks for the reply. Point 5 was a good point, as were the others too.



In regards to point #4, I was thinking that the directory site would just be for the purpose of forming a triangle with the link exchange opps that I ran across. These are not ideal opps, rather "something is better than nothing opps". Therefore I didn't plan on seo/sem'ing it, rather just keeping it live and not really caring about the page rank. Of course that means the site wouldn't have much link juice punch to it, but it would be better than nothing, because I'm not willing to clutter my site with competitor's links.

Thoughts?

Best,

Link Exchange is so 2000 my man. By doing a recipricol link you are in essence getting a backlink, but you may be giving up traffic from your site.

Much better to build one way links through other methods.

Thank you everyone for the great feedback. It is through all the responses that I've been able to better understand this topic. ...I've decided that I'm not going to build the directory, but instead focus my efforts elsewhere.

Hi all,

I think it is not bad idea to exchange the links if you have good page rank then not problem will come but there is low PR then your site may be banned.

Thanks.......

Hello friends.....

A link exchange is a confederation of websites that operates similarly to a web ring. Webmasters register their web sites with a central organization, that runs the exchange, and in turn receive from the exchange HTML code which they insert into their web pages. In contrast to a web ring, where the HTML code simply comprises simple circular ring navigation hyperlinks, in a link exchange the HTML code causes the display of banner advertisements, for the sites of other members of the exchange, on the member web sites, and webmasters have to create such banner advertisements for their own web sites.

Thanks.....

greg knows link building

the days of directory listings from anything on the web are gone... become a guest blogger or start a blog in your space and get in to news searches and industry references