Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is what is a link exchange and what is its implications for SEO? The reason why this is important is because link exchange is something that's an old school SEO thing, but it's still somewhat talked about today. And I think there's a lot of understanding, but also misconceptions about it so I want to go into that today.
But before we begin, this is the Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a Pu'Er Tea that was gifted to me by my grandmother. It's a Pu'Er Tea that I tend to drink probably it's the second most I drink of all my teas. And so this is a Pu'Er Tea. I can not tell you why it tastes any different. I think there is a difference from the other Pu'Er Tea that I've had on this channel, but I'm just not skilled enough to talk about that. So therefore, you're just going to have to trust me that it is a different type of tea.
But let's go ahead and jump on into the SEO. So what is a link exchange? Let's talk about that first. What a link exchange is, is pretty simple. It just means what it sounds like. You're working with a website to give them a link and they'll give you a link back.
And the reason why this is a important conversation is because back in the day at the beginning of SEO, a lot of websites would do this. They'd say, hey, let's help each other out. You link to my site, I'll link to your website. And then this became quite rampant where people were just doing a lot of these link exchanges.
And then Google started being able to understand this. And they start actually cracking down on people doing link exchanges, because they found that it was not always the most honoring the search engine.
Links are supposed to be endorsements. You're only supposed to drive links to a page that you actually like, but link exchanges are seen as not authentic. You're just trying to exchange links because you're trying to drive up your search rankings. So it seems inorganic.
So link exchanges pretty much are not very recommended. They're actually pretty much against Google's guidelines. But something that is pretty interesting about link exchanges is that there's a nuance to it. And I don't mean that you're trying to cheat the system. I'm just talking about the reality. If you are engaging in link building where you're asking everybody, hey, link to me and I'll link to you, that's link exchange and that's not recommended because you might be caught and second, it's not always the most honorable SEO method.
But second, the most important thing I want to talk about is link exchange doesn't mean though that if you link to someone that they can not link back to you. Ahrefs did this really great study where they know that link exchange are not really accepted, but when you look at the study, they found that a lot of the top ranking pages, when they would get referring domains back to their website, they would also link back to the website giving them the link.
And that's because, hey, we got featured in this magazine or hey, we want people to see this new article that we wrote. And I believe that it was a pretty large percentage of the referring domains coming into the site, it was a large percentage that were sending links right back to the website. So the point I'm trying to make is that when you're reading literature about link exchange, it's not that you can't link back to someone who's linking back to you. It's not so micro, it's more on a grand scale. What you want to just be mindful of, you should not be doing link strategies that are specifically only, hey, give me this link and I'll give you a link.
You need to be running link building strategies that are more organic. Hey, I'm writing contributorship for our [inaudible 00:03:25] piece, would you link to it? Then there will be unintentional link exchanges, because you're linking to a site that mentioned to you, and that's also going to get back to you because they know you wrote this great article for them so they're sending you an author link back. There's a lot of that that happens. And that's okay.
So the point of the video I'm trying to make is when you're doing link building, don't shoot yourself in the foot and tell a website, hey, I'm going to write for you guys and then please send an author link back with it on your site you never linked to that piece. That's okay. It just, you can't have your link building look like you are only doing link exchanges.
If, unintentionally as a side effect that you're doing amazing link building, and you're wanting to link to those asks that link back to you, that's okay. So again, I know that I'm talking in a vague, conceptual sense, but that's what I want you to know. Don't handicap yourself by thinking you can't have a link back to sites you're linking to, and then second, I think what... It's very worth it, go look at the Ahrefs study. I'll link it in the YouTube description so that you can go look at it.
That link exchange study will show you the realities of what they've found. If you are someone who's worried about link exchanges, it will help set your mind frame straight on what you can do and can't do. But again, in summary, just don't engage in link exchange schemes. And if you're doing good link building, you unintentionally might create some patterns that look like link exchanges. But if you're not doing that, don't worry, it's just an unintended consequence. It's very normal for a lot of websites. So you don't have to worry too much about it.
But, I'm going to go ahead and pour my tea. If you guys found this video valuable, please like and subscribe and hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.