Is exchanging links still useful? What are the precautions?

When it comes to exchanging friendly links, no matter how big the website is, any company that wants to gain natural traffic from search engines and takes action has the work of exchanging friendly links. Now that the weight of link algorithms has been drastically reduced, how useful is link exchange?

Let me first explain why the link algorithm weight mentioned above has been drastically reduced. We are all search engines like Google and Baidu, which started out with hyperlink computing. Ten years ago, this type of search engine basically used the two core algorithms of content relevance of the search term to the web page + hyperlink calculation to intervene in the ranking rules of the website in the search engine. At that time, we also had some considerations for algorithms related to user experience, but their proportion was not as large as it is today!

I learned from the description of a former core technical personnel of Baidu that user experience algorithms now account for more than 50% of search rankings. As one thing grows, another shrinks, which means that the algorithms for content relevance and link calculation have been adjusted downward. But it doesn’t mean it’s useless!

Is exchanging links still useful? What are the precautions?

Link calculation is still one of the core algorithms of search engines. Why do I say so? Let’s make an assumption below!

User experience algorithms now account for such a high proportion, but for a new website, how can it accumulate user experience data? Without this accumulation, how can you participate in the ranking? This has turned into a vicious cycle where all old websites are ranked, but new websites have basically no hope of getting ranked. Obviously this is unreasonable!

In fact, search engines will occasionally skip the user experience algorithm to give some sites with higher text density and higher link calculation scores the opportunity to participate in the ranking. In this way, these sites will have the opportunity to participate in the ranking and accumulate user experience data. However, through continuous accumulation, text density + link calculation + user experience, the score is calculated comprehensively. The ranking will be gradually improved and stabilized!

The above explanation is clear. Let’s take a look at the topic of this article. Is exchanging friendly links still useful? If it works, how should it be done! What are the precautions?

Is exchanging friendly links still useful?

First of all, in link calculation, the most effective is the exchange of friendly links. And friendly links are also a type of external link building.

Compared with posting on forums, replying to messages on blogs, adding company page links on B2B sites, etc., they are not as good as exchanging friendly links.

There is nothing wrong with creating external links by posting, leaving comments on blogs, or using B2B sites, but please ask yourself about the prerequisites. Are the posts you made, the corresponding pages for leaving comments, and the pages of the subset created by the B2B site included? Is it involved in the ranking of some of the words you expect? If none of these are present, the result is:

Unindexed external links:
The external link page you created can be said to be invalid. Is it useful to use an invalid page to build links for your own website?

Unranked external links:

Although the external link page you created is included, it is not ranked. In the short term, the quality of this page is not high. In the long run, it is also possible that the search engine will consider it a low-quality page and remove the index data. In this case, will there still be any effect?

Prerequisites for Link Exchange

The same goes for the page where you exchange friendly links, whether it is the homepage, channel page, or other page. If it is not included and not ranked, doesn’t it mean the same as the two situations above?

Therefore, exchanging friendly links also has at least three prerequisites :

The exchanged pages should be already indexed;

The page itself should be ranked on the homepage for some search terms (the search term index is recommended to be no less than 100);

For the ranking of participating search terms, you should observe for at least one week to confirm that the ranking of the other party's search terms is stable. If it is an old site, you can relax the policy;

How to exchange friendly links now

How to exchange friendly links depends on your purpose. There is a difference between whether you want to increase the weight of the entire site based on the link calculation algorithm, or whether you want to improve the ranking of certain keywords on the homepage.

Exchange friendly links to improve the weight of the entire site

If you are aiming to improve the weight of your website, it is recommended that you find some sites with higher weight to exchange with. There is no need to consider whether it is a related industry or field. Don’t even consider whether it’s keywords or your brand words that are linking to your site.

In this way, while the weight of your homepage is constantly improved through this link, when the internal link construction is improved, the website will grow in the link calculation dimension. This is based on the entire site. It is basically unrealistic to rely on this to improve the ranking of your specific keywords.

Changing links for ranking improvement

In order to improve the ranking, in addition to dealing with the role of link transfer weight, the relevance of the anchor text link must also be considered. For example, if your website is an SEO blog , then at least you should exchange with sites in the SEO field. And the anchor text linking to your website should be your desired target keyword.

The rest is to consider the prerequisites for exchanging friendly links.