User Comments

1. 

   3/24/09

   MrCheeseburger

   I don't think I have ever asked someone to read my blog if I read theirs. It seems too childish. I read a lot of blogs, and I would rather people come on their own than me begging people to read it.

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2. 

   3/24/09

   Anok

   Link farms, link exchanges and all that reciprocal you scratch my blog and I'll scratch yours really doesn't do anything for your blog.
   
   I wouldn't say it's immoral, but you're right in not participating in it. It may give your blog a temporary boost, but after a while all of that reciprocation might actually hurt your page rank, and your credibility as a blogger.
   
   Just keep plugging away, and do what you can to drive dedicated readers to you blog.

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3. 

   3/24/09

   timethief

   @asoothsayer
   I'm not going to deal with any moral aspects here at all. What follows is valid information on making linking decisions. Please read it carefully and read the references as well and then make your own decisions.
   
   Reciprocal link exchanges
   Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inbound link and outbound link ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site’s link profile is.
   
   Warning
   If your web pages and the site get a lot of reciprocal (two-way links), especially if they are not related then the search engines will assume that these are solicited links, and search engines do not give much importance to such two-way or reciprocal links, and in some cases may even penalize your site. Consequently, I no longer do link exchanges with sites that are not directly related to my own sites.
   
   Back story
   Here’s the back story. In order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links many webmasters had agreed to reciprocal link exchanges. However, because many of these links were not relevant (see: Understanding Backlinks below), they were disregarded in the last Google update. That meant that although the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound link still got counted and this diluted the relevancy score of many sites. The result was that many sites dropped off the Google map during the last Google update.
   
   Link farms
   Search engine criteria for quality inbound links has become increasingly tougher due to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve incoming links by deceptive techniques, like hidden links, or automatically generated pages designed solely to provide incoming links to websites. These pages are called link farms; they are disregarded by search engines, and linking to a link farm can result in your site being banned entirely.
   
   Blogging for money
   Also note that if you are blogging for money then PageRank can be a major issue. Once your site has a higher PR (4 or 5) then higher paying writing opportunities become available to you. However, if you write for services like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads, Smorty, and/or PayPerPost, etc. then it’s important to understand that Google doesn’t like paid links, so if you have them and if your site doesn’t indicate them with “nofollow” or, if you’re active on the Internet selling links on your site then your site's PR will suffer.
   
   If you don’t care about Google and PageRank then get involved with services like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads, Smorty, and/or PayPerPost, etc. and sell all the links you want. But if you don’t want to be harmed in Google PR updates then don’t sell links and don't link to sites that do.
   
   Non reciprocal links rock!
   The best linking strategy is to get a lot of non-reciprocal links (or one-way links), which are also relevant links to your site from high ranking and popular sites. When your site receives a lot of quality non-reciprocal links, the search engines consider your site and the web pages that receive these inbound quality links as containing highly valuable web content.
   
   Tools and Resources
   (1) There's a helpful tool you can use to insure you aren't linking to a bad neighborhood blog. By using the tool you can avoid linking to link farms, gambling sites, drug peddling sites and flesh peddling sites as well as other undesirable sites. www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
   
   (2) In addition if you search the web you will find continuously updated lists of sites that have been banned and blacklisted by Google so you can avoid linking to them.
   
   (3) Google Page rank checkers are also useful:
   www.googlepagerankchecker.com/
   
   
   References
   Understanding Backlinks
   onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/understanding-backlinks/
   Understanding Reciprocal and Non-Reciprocal Links
   onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/understanding-reciprocal-and-non-recip...
   More information and advice:
   SEO Basics for on Page Optimization
   onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/seo-basics-for-on-page-optimisation/
   Getting the perfect link
   onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/getting-the-perfect-link/
   
   Hope this helps

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4. 

   3/24/09

   cooper

   To apply morals to blogging links is a little strange frankly, it is only blogging, but If you find it all tedious and distasteful just ignore it. With so many site cropping up over the last couple years where people promoted ink exchanges and the "you subscribe to my feed and I'll subscribe to yours", a lot of people who had just started blogging kind of fell into that instead of just writing their blog and going about their merry way gathering readers as time went by -just ignore all that most people do.

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