we have plenty other threads on this already...but i'm sure you went through them like you mentioned.
put up a link and see what happens /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />
link exchanges always sound great, as long as they're relavant /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

Yea, but they're all a bit out-dated... threads have a way of dying off.

The real question is 'relevant to what' ... The page it's on, right? That's why I would create a seperate page that would make it's links relevant.

But I don't really like automated link exchanges, HTML is easier and less risky... so I ask again, if anyone wants to start a swap, let me know.

The google PR system totally changed peoples wants to add links to thier sites.

Instead of doing it for the visitor, People do it for the PR and only that in mind. I remember 3 years ago when you could have a great links page with some awesome links of their that today wouldn't be worth anyone to link to, yet still have the best information.

either way, wouldn't you want something relavant anyway.
you'll also know that they use links and their words to plug into their "find similar sites" formula.

what site would I be linking to?

Actually I would consider a list of Christian sites to be highly relevant. It's not like we're linking to casino or X-rated sites. Why does the idea of linking get such a knee-jerk reaction anyway? We're not talking about a link farm, we're talking about a highly specific niche of sites (Namely Christian web masters and their client sites that post on this forum) that could (and would) benefit greatly from coming together and sharing links. Most of our clients and visitors would consider it relevant too, considering the demographic we serve.

The web is built on links, linking is a GOOD thing. PR or not, I'd still be doing this anyway. PR is just a nice bonus (and motivator for those of the slack persuasion). Good PR or not, it would be a great way to show others just how deep the community is. Having an active and growing network of sites that take the time to say 'Hey look, we know you're new... here's some sites you might be interested in." And yes, it would contribute to the PR of the group as a whole, allowing us to compete more effectively in virtually every crawler that exists.

About what site to link to, this was an open thing for anyone to link to anyone. Like an open and active exchange or swap. I mean we've got like how many people here? Quite a few, but nobody has taken the time to organize the linking power we have here. A simple thread saying "Here's a list of webmasters that might be willing to link to you... drop them a line" might be a very good idea.

You've got a point, Aaron. My own personal website is not directly related to evangelism. But I might consider building a "cool christian webmasters' links" page. If I can implement it right, I might be able to make it go smoothly.

Let me know what you find out.

-David-

my pr stinks

Well, I'd like to say that just because another site is christian, doesn't mean it's relavant. I'm not saying to blow off other christians, because we're all here to help each other out. One main reason I link to Christian Web Masters is because...well I have great friendships with many of the people here, and it's the least I could do to help out from what I've gained, and for what I've given.
But really, my website is not about learning PHP or graphic design, it's about articles for college students. to me there's no similarity (no, don't try to think of one).
If I had not been a member here and have benefited so much, I don't think I wuold ever be supporting them with a link because it's just not relavant.
I'd be more likely to link to perhaps different christian devotionals or collegiate websites.

*Trying to think of a similarity between polvero.com and CWM*
Oh, what were you saying again? /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

My belief on links is that they should be provided as a path for interested visitors rather than just search engines.

Agrees

/laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" /> lol, the similarity is that one crazy guy that's member on both forums.

Me? I'm not crazy.

well that makes two of us who aren't /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

hrm.... /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

Hey Aaron, i've thought of doing this many times and think its a great idea, so are you thinking like a website that visitors can go and exchange with others? I wanted to start one a while ago, but no one wanted to do so, so i put it off. I'd love to work with you on it, if this is what your thinking of.

To the others:
A large number of visitors to my site are local, and here in Indy there are a large number of Christians. There would be definite interest there. That may not be the case for you, so then don't swap... but that doesn't mean others wouldn't find it valuable. Nevertheless I bet you'd find that people WERE interested. Magazine articles for students... ever consider the faith of many of those students? 10-to-1 if you asked them, you'd find the relevance you're looking for.

But it's your choice. People don't just hunt on one specific target like a shark with a frickin laser on it's head, they surf from one specific topic outwards to more generalized topics of interest in direct proportion to the frequency of their usage. The more they visit the site, the more they explore it's links in depth. This also tends to happen in bursts, the first 30 times they visit the site... they may not even notice other pages. But then all of a sudden... woosh. This allows a site to make a statement about it's personality, allowing it to be unique in a crowd of background noise. It's part of branding the WWW user experience.

Inspiration100:
I was thinking just a thread, like this. Maybe convince someone to
make it sticky after a while. High PR shouldn't be a condition of getting linked, otherwise new people won't be able to use use it.

I host a few relevant sites I'm going to start linking from, and work with others that might do the same. I was thinking of just people that are willing to link to others in this forum saying "Hey, I'm willing to link to people... contact me."

Maybe something more formal later, but for now the goal is to spark communication between people that think 'Hey, sounds like a good idea.' Building a community, that's what it's about.

Aaron and I are already sharing links between our sites, perhaps a few others of you would care to add your link to my site? I'm looking for relative sites that have to do with our categories. http://www.simpleletter.com/links.php

Yea! /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

So, we just post links to our sites, then other people who think that would go good on their site stick in on theirs, and you look at the links here and see what would go good on yours?

If that's the case, then my site is http://www.uppervent.com and it's geared mostly towards Christian teens.

I LOVE that domain name!!!! That is so cool. Great idea, design, and domain name. *mental note to add link* I might have to buy a shirt too.... /cool.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="B)" border="0" alt="cool.gif" />

i'll assume you mean my site...
in this case...you might be right, but i doubt it would be the case. folks may link to me, but sometimes I don't think an official "swap" has to happen. folks from one site can be interested in another, but not always like reciprocal.
i try not to link other site's just because they're a christian website.
i know sometimes of course it isn't always about the PR, but you must admit, PR helps your serps and thus we are ALL trying to reach the most amount of people for certain keywords.
i know that some downfalls of getting linked from a completely non-relavant site, you could possibly be associated with it. what would happen if someone linked to your site from a porn site? (doubtful, but what if?)
but then again, we can play the what-if game all day long. The logic is, as an SEOer, you go for the most relavant and choose your afiliates wisely.

Speaking of which, I'm sure that anyone who has cancer, or is trying to find information about cancer would be interested in reading through one of the pages on my site.... christian or non christian alike.
[Link Removed by Rudy507 on 14 April 2009]
It's a start, and we're all here for the purpose of reaching the unbelieving.

Let me know how I can help you, and what your sites are like. Don't post that in here though - let's not get carried away with this topic. Feel free to email me. I can't speak for all of you about that.

However, as concern was stated above, I must agree. Having links just for the sake of PR I think would be a waste of time. We must reach out, and our sites must be realivant to someone's elses interests.

Speaking of which, take a look in the web evangelism forum... there's some good discussion going on.
-David-

I'd love to exchange links with anyone, just not ffa link pages please!

ffa links? Sorry, I must be a bit out of it.

Thanks in advance for the interpretation.

FFA = Free For All.

It's a place where people can post their links automatically thru a script. You type in the link text and click "submit" and it's done.

That's pretty worthless and Google typically penalizes these sites.

I read all the replies to this thread and with my poor knowledge of English language (English being my 3rd language) this is what I could understand from your debate that; link exchange could serve two purposes:

1- To increase interested visitors. This should be done with sites relevant to your site or sites that compliment your site.
2- To improve your PR. This could be done with any site.

But aren't both serving the same purpose?
I believe they do and if you don't agree then listen to this:

In final analysis both links serve the same purpose to increase interested visitors to your site.

In case #1 above the purpose is obvious
In case #2 which could be done with any site is to improve your PR which will get you higher ranking (on search engines) on your selected key words which in turn will increase your interested visitors.

Therefore, in link exchange relevancy or no relevancy the final purpose is the same; to increase your interested visitors.

I am all for "link exchange" relevancy or no relevancy. One other thing my site " One and Only Super Nutrition " (URL WWW.EHEALTHYSHOPPER.COM) is relevant to everyone even non Christians because it deals with human health and the powers available to all for health and healing.

Let's not forget that HEALTH is the MOST VALUABLE ASSET that GOD has granted to everyone (Christian or non Christian) and we should protect it.

Also you will not find many sites of nutritional products with Christian understanding of health and healing.

Anyone interested in link exchange with our site please email (Carlaiden AT hotmail DOT Com)

Caro

What warrants a FFA page to google?

I've seen some sites with 50 links on their dedicated to what the visitor is looking for. I wouldn't consider those FFA pages, but would google?

Sorry Guys,
Now that we are on the subject of link exchange I forgot to ask you about a link exchange soft ware.

Any one out there knows anything or had experience with Zeus software from Cyber-Robatics.com?

If you have I would like to hear it.
I heard from someone on another forum that he had good results from using that software.

Caro

Ive got afew links from sites running Zeus. I perfer plain ol' HTML personally. Or I'd write my own if I needed it. Not difficult at all, just categories and a mod-rewrite.

What defines an FFA? Good question. A directory like 1234-designers isn't an FFA altho they accept everyone in the web design field.

Maybe it has to do with the topics that it links to, or the number of topics. Altho I link to math, science, chess, bible, and all sorts of topics that I'm interested in and I'm not an FFA. They're all relevant to me, so I link to them (it serves as a backup to my
bookmarks page, more or less).

Usually, if I'm worried about it, I'll run a link: blah on their site or check their PR. If I don't like the sites that link to it, I usually won't accept a reciprocal link from it. But there are some borderline sites. Judgement call I guess. How Google makes the distinction is a mystery.

(Btw, running a link: blah, and then link: those sites, can be an excellent way of finding topic-related directories to get listed in.)

- Aaron

Caro,

I use Zeus exclusively to find reciprocal link partners. I have also been hand-selected to go through www.GorrillaWebsiteMarketing.com's mentoring course. After working with a mentor for several sessions, we had our Zeus trained effectively to "Genius" level and were finding hundreds of applicable websites in no time!

We were trained in how to list our link, what anchor text to use, how to optimize our title/description/keywords tags as well as work with keyword density. Most of the training has proved very sucessful as we have gone from not even in the TOP 1000 results on Google for the word "t-shirts" to #43 (as of this morning) in just 6 months time!

Honestly, there really isn't a program like Zeus out there that works as well when you know how to properly configure and train your Zeus. I've written a custom Access -> MySQL import script to take the Zeus data and use it on my PHP/MySQL driven website and to automate the process of sending contact emails and auditing links from potential link partners. It's quite an accomplishment, but now I let Zeus do the finding of potential partners, and my PHP scripts do the rest of the work of taking that data and contacting the owners of those websites and request link exchanges.

Not ALL of the human element has been removed, so we are not a FFA "link farm". I manually view each link before we send a "link request" email out. This way we can be selective about what sites we want to link with, thus increasing our Link Directory Theme Tightness. (How closely related our link directory topics/categories are)

Hopefully this is helpful to someone. If you want help configuring your Zeus, PM me and I'd be glad to help you out. I'll say that the most important thing with Zeus is to train it to "Genius" level. That means you need to train about 500-700 keywords to get to that point. Yes, it might take a week of your time, but pays off immensely!

FYI: Contrary to what Polvero may feel, Google CANNOT and WILL NOT punish any site for the sites that link TO it. There is no way a webmaster can control what sites link to his, and therefore there cannot be any penalty. Don't worry if a porn site somehow decides to link to your site, Google won't count that against your "Link Directory Theme Tightness"...

contrary to what i may feel? i'm getting the impression it's what you feel on the "FYI"
i would say the last thing you want is po/rn site's linking to you because google DOES associate words to links and where they go. imagine what would happen if all the sudden all these po/rn site's started linking to your site...with keywords like get na/ked or free po/rn. you'd eventually receive the hit on that.
of course, the content ON SITE is most important, but you can't say that other links don't have any relavancy....because that's not true /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

Yea, that's a big concern. The last thing I want is my site listing ANYWHERE on an adult search query. *shudder*

Even worse would be other SE-people doing a link: mysite.com and finding those pop up... ughh. My clients would NOT be happy. I don't even want to consider how I'd explain that.

I'm saying that how can you possibly control who links to your website?? You can't. Any webmaster in the world could of his own free will choose to put a link to your website, or take one of your banners and put it on his site. (I'm not going to get into the probability of this happening, but it certianly can and does happen)

How can Google possibly allow this to hurt your website ranking and SERPS? It's not fair to the webmaster who has been working on his site for years and years, methodically optimizing for best search results.

If this was allowed, competitive businesses could pay off "assassin sites" to do this kid of deed to larger websites (such as www.ae.com or www.gap.com or whoever) and seriously take out their search engine rankings and results. The Internet would become the "Wild West" and people would start to pay for "protection" from these attacks.

I honestly don't think Google can rank you lower or influence your search results from websites with whom you don't have a reciprocal linking. If one site links to another without reciprocation, there obviously is a reason why and Google is smart enough to know.

When you do reciprocal linking Google realizes that both sites trust each other and want to express that they are of the same theme and concept. This is where you can get into trouble. I agree with all of the above posts that recommend "link pruning" to make sure all your links have links back to you, as well as making sure those sites are still related to the theme/concept of your website.

"Link pruning" is a painful thing, but must be done I'd say about every 30-45 days for best effectiveness.

I think it would be awesome to start maybe a sub forum for people that wanna trade links? Would this be possible? If not anyways, i'm in - I'd love to trade links with anyone

i know it's not fair. and i know you can't stop someone from linking. that's just the way it works though. you can in the end protect leaching and other sorts...and you can eventually get those other folks to remove a link....but it can penalize you.

There's nothing you can do about surface linking (to the main page). Deep linking involves copyright law, however, and can be stopped.

Nevertheless, just because you can't prevent someone from linking to you doesn't
mean that people would want to link to you. Usually you have to give someone a reason to want to link to your site. There are a number of sites I wouldn't want to
give a reason to.

?? /huh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":huh:" border="0" alt="huh.gif" />

lol /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

Within the next coming weeks I will be setting up a small directory with a section dedicated to help all my CWM buddies out.
I would hope that I can get at least a PR 4 linked to each and all of you.
In return, this might take most of you linking back /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />. But we'll see what happens.