The past week or so I’ve been getting a bunch of emails asking to exchange links with one of my websites. I haven’t accepted any yet.

Here’s why:

Nearly every links page my site was going to be placed on had an explosion of links on it. Dozens and dozens and dozens of links.

Most not on topic. Maybe the website itself is, but the links page sure isn’t (links to dating sites, hardware sites, php script sites, etc.)

The page itself is a motley mix of crammed in content so that if a visitor was interested in poking through the links page - they wouldn’t find my link unless they were very determined.

Really what benefit do I have to exchange links with a site like that? Even if the PR is high - there are 75+ links on the page and I’m buried where no one will find me!

Here’s what I look for when doing a link exchange:

• A clean page with no more than 20 or so links
• The site is on topic with mine
• The links exchange page is on topic - meaning the other links on the page are a good fit with mine
• The spiders aren’t blocked and some PR shows (doesn’t matter to me how high or low the PR is)
• The links are clean - not script generated
• The links page is found from the website’s main page (so that visitors will find it).

These aren’t hard and fast rules of mine. I’ll bend them in certain cases. For example - I’d be a fool to turn my back on a high traffic, very targeted site. I’ll give it a twirl - no matter how full the links page is. I’ve found a goody or two that way.

I have a few link exchanges that offer my sites steady traffic. I try to setup my link pages the same way - something clean, something useful to my both my visitors and my link partners.

Why? The more successful your link exchange page is, the easier it is to maintain that link partnership as well as find new ones.

I realize the thinking is to gather as many inbound links as you can, with the anchor text that you want so that you can rise through the SERPs. I’m just not convinced that doing 1,000 crappy link exchanges is good SEO, short term or long term.