This is the catch-all page for short and sweet Internet marketing questions and answers. If you have an Internet marketing question, just submit it as a comment. If we can answer it, we will post the answer as an additional post or we may just include the answer on this page. There are no stupid questions with Internet marketing. All of us started out asking the same questions that you are wondering about today.

What should I do with requests for link exchanges?

The biggest mistake that you can make is to respond to these messages or provide a link to the requestor’s site. Unless you personally know and trust the sender, just delete them. Most requests for link exchanges are sent by automated programs that search for sites that post an e-mail address and use a similar keyword theme.

From my experience, 99% of link exchange requests are fraudulent. When you exchange links with another site, they are called "reciprocal links". Reciprocal links are easily identified by search engines and have limited value because their value is discounted. The fraud comes into play because most requests come from people who really only want one-way links to their site. They may post a link to your site, but it may be for a page that is not available to search engines because it is either blocked (using the robots.txt file) or may not be linked to from other pages in the site. In other words, the link that they provide to your site is worthless. Sometimes links are found on pages that contain nothing more than lists of links. These pages are called "link farms". Link farm pages have been penalized by search engines for many years and have little or no value.

The best links with the best value for your site are natural links. These are typically one-way links to related pages within your site. The best links are from sites that share a common theme with your site.

What is a keyword theme?

A keyword theme is the search phrase that best represents your web site. A site can have many keyword themes, each representing individual pages. Ideally, they should all be related and should reinforce a primary theme. Search engine algorithms analyze and determine the keyword themes that represent pages in your site when they visit. They use those to assign rank positions to the pages in your site relative to all other pages on the Internet that represent a given keyword theme.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.