Exchanging Website Links Is for Losers

I get a lot of e-mails from people wanting to exchange website links, particularly to my retirement-related websites.

Most of the time I turn these people down.

Here is an e-mail I just received:

Hi,

I have found your website when searching the web on the topics related to my website theme. I must say your site content is very good and I think we would benefit much from possible partnersip - for example link exchange. This would bring more targeted traffic to our sites, plus increase our websites' weight at the search engines, as they give greater value to the links from the topic-related sites rather than irrelevant backlinks.

My website http://www.readingforyoursuccess.com/ is definetely related
to yours.

I would be glad to link to your site in return to you linking back to mine.

Please feel free to email me direct to discuss the details on the possible partnership.

Hope for the fruitful cooperation

Best regards,
Scott Dinsmore
http://www.readingforyoursuccess.com/

First, this guy tells me his website is related to mine and doesn't even mention which website of mine. It could be UnrealJob.com or Retirement Jobs at Real Success or any of the other 20 plus websites I have.

This guy also doesn't know anything about the power of website links.

This was my reply:

Hello Scott:

First, I am not sure which website of mine you are referring to but frankly I don't care. (I have between 15 and 20 websites).

When you approach people for a so called link exchange or any business proposition, may I suggest that you offer some great value.

Fact is, you are not offering me any value.

Worse, what you are offering could hurt me.

I checked out your website.

Your home page may have a Google Page Rank of 3 but where you place links to
other people's websites ( http://www.readingforyoursuccess.com/our-link-partners ) actually has a Google Page Rank less that zero. When the google bar has nothing but white on it, this is zero. When the white doesn't even open up, it's worse than zero.

If you offered to place a link to any of websites from that webpage for free, I would decline. In fact, if you placed any of my websites on there, I would demand that you take them off.

This webpage can be looked at as a link farm by Google because it has nothing but links on it and Google will penalize websites that appear on link farms.

Perhaps you think that I don't know what I am talking about but I do.

My retirement related websites such as The Retirement Quotes Cafe and The Joy of Being Retired get about 120,000 visitors a month and I have never used PPC.

I also don't waste my time with link exchanges because I know that this is a very low results way to make things happen.

In fact, exchanging website links the way you are doing it is for losers.

I could go into this with a lot more detail, but I would be wasting my time.

Ernie J. Zelinski
The Creativity Guy Too Prosperous to Do Mornings
Best-Selling Author, Innovator, and Unconventional Career Expert
Author of the Bestseller How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 150,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
and the International Bestseller The Joy of Not Working
(Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

Here is another e-mail that I received:

Hi,

My name is Ashley. I've just visited your website Fun at Work and was wondering if you'd be interested in exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a home page link back from our "Office Humor" website. The site has been online since year 2000.

I hope you find this link appropriate and useful. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Ashley

This was my reply:

Hello Ashley:

I turn most website link requests when I see that the Google page rank of the webpage where they are offering the link is less than 3 because where they are asking that I put a link to their websites is on one of mine that has a page rank of 3 or 4.

Often the Google Page Rank bar doesn't even show white on their webpages which means the webpages have a Page Rank of less than zero, as several webpages on your website have.

I do link to websites that have given me some value, even without them asking for the links.

For example when I found by accident that Quintessential Careers had placed a great review of my book How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free on their website, I linked to their website from over 10 of my various retirement websites, giving them at least 25 links. This got their webpage with the review to a Google Page Rank of 4.

See the review at: How to Retire Happy Review

When you are prepared to offer something that is this valuable to me, I will
return the favor.

Also See: Link Exchange on SEO Losers

Many thanks and so long for now,

Ernie J. Zelinski