One strange thing about having a blog that talks about SEO is that the word SEO is a major search term for people wanting to contact you and ask if they can trade links with you. If you remember, I wrote a post back in January titled SEO vs Backlinks, where I said that I’d prefer content and SEO to chasing after backlinks. Well, it’s time I talked more about backlinks, and I’m going to do it in a list post because everyone knows that list posts do very well on blogs.
A quick reminder to the uninitiated. Backlinks are when you have your link on someone else’s site and it links back to yours. Sometimes people ask to swap links, but you can also get a backlink by commenting on other blogs. For sites that don’t have blogs, people will still ask to backlink to your website if you have a links page of some kind. Anyway, here’s my reasons why I won’t do it:
1. The emails I get asking me to trade links with them are irritating. I get at least 5 of these a day, and they’re all coming from Gmail accounts which makes them seem suspect to begin with. I did go through the first week of telling these people not to contact me again but they don’t listen, so I’ve now set up the spam filter to blacklist them, but I still have to delete the emails.
2. People who come to you asking to trade links are very sneaky. Most of them will put you on a webpage that has no discernible link on any other page of the site. In essence, your linking on that page not only doesn’t help you, but it hurts you because search engines think you’re in what they call a “bad neighborhood”, and thus don’t give you any credit, while you’ve been all “nice” and put them on a valid page on your site.
3. If I don’t like receiving email, I’m certainly not going to turn around and do what I hate. As I said above, I’d rather go out and find some blogs I’m interested in, comment, and then put in a link to either my blogs or my website and move on.
4. Trying to get a lot of backlinks is a lot of work. The people who do this send out literally hundreds of emails a day for very little return. Now, if you really want backlinks and have a bit of cash, you can pay someone to have a link put into their blog content, which they’ll often so as long as your link is relevant to their content. Or you can get into the game of writing a lot of guest posts, as everyone who accepts them allows one or two links back to your site.
5. Frankly, I’m still convinced that you can do as well if you shore up your internal linking. This works best if you have a lot of content to internally link to, but even sites with only 10 pages, if done well, can benefit.
Of course, nothing really gets a website over better than having good and continual content. Trust me, it’s much easier to do.
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