Free Link Exchange Sites

Since the beginning og the search engine, its creators have been trying to find ways to automatically sort the search results so that the best, most relavent site gets the highest spot on the results page. Several ways were tried and we have ended up with a system that counts the number of incoming links your site has. The search engines like Google then consider those links as "popularity votes". The more sites linking to you, the more Google considers you popular and the assumption is that if you are popular there must be a reason. They then add in a number of other factors such as the sites age, ratio between text and links and hundreds of other factors. The main factor all in all is still the links though and also how closely related to your site the linking sites are.
Google preferrs these links to occur natually when a fellow site owner finds a site they like and simply adds a link to it on thier site out of genuine interest. But link exchange sites suffice for this, the disadvantage being that you will need much more reciprical links than you would if they were all natural or "organic" links.
Link exchanges have seperate catagories that you can choose to allow exchange requests from to help you keep the links relavent to your site. This is very important. If you link your site about sports cars with somthing like automobile tires you will be improving matters. Unrealted links do you no good. There are some people who say that this only really applies to reciprical links and that an unrelated ONE WAY link does help your rankings but I cannot confirm this from personal experience.

The scripts that link exchange sites use only work on top level domains ie: "www.yoursite.com/" with nothing after the slash. But link directories work just as good or better and often you get a one way link because some directory sites do not require a reciprical link. The only disadvantage is that it takes up alot of your time to post in these directories. You need hundreds of these links to do you much good so the time spent is grueling. But it does work.


There are sites that solve this by providing a directory submitter service. This can be a great way to get over 1000 one way links from directory sites without spending half your liftime on the project.

You can learn more from this free E-book called "How to use directory submissions to increase web traffic".

There are automatic link exchanges where they use a script such as PHP or ASP that will automatcally place the links on your site when you trade links at the link exchange site. These are also called dynamic link pages. These are much easier to use than manual exchanges. These cannot be used for a Squidoo lens though but if you own your own website, you can earn credits by having links on your website and spend them to promote your squidoo lenses.



Manual link exchanges require you to manually place the links on your site pointing to your new partner site which gets a bit tedious.


There are also some link exchanges that exchange one way links by placing all the members sites in three or more "pods" or groups. Then sites from group one send one way links to group 2, but get their return links from group 3 so that all links are one way not reciprical to each other. I am not sure if these work or not, and many in forums say they do not because of so many unrelated links that you get from these sites.

If you have a new website, and you want to trade links at one of these sites, it is first important that you wait until your site is indexed in Google. Many sites will refuse to trade links with you if you are not listed yet in the search engines. Directory submissions are a good alternative for a new site because the site will get indexed the next time that directory gets crawled buy a search engine.

These link exchanges are called reciprical because both sites give one and other a link. There are several of these online, and I will not attempt to list them all. Instead I will list the very best ones that I have used. The links below should help you get started.

1. Linkshighway
2. Gotlinks
3. LinkExchanged

There are more that I will add soon. You might also look though my website that lists the top free advertising sites.