So does it mean that link exchanged is illegal?. Actually I am already into link exchanged in another forum especially in my blogs. I never thought that it is not acceptable.

Originally Posted by crush25

So does it mean that link exchanged is illegal?. Actually I am already into link exchanged in another forum especially in my blogs. I never thought that it is not acceptable.

No it's not illegal. But some people might think it's immoral plus Google now recommends that you do not link exchange, particularly with sites that are unrelated to yours or "bad neighbourhoods"

It's taking over the other forums, too.

crush it's not illegal and I'd even question that it's immoral. Mostly it's just ineffective. A year or two ago how many links you had might have been more important than the quality of those links. Things have shifted to where quality is more important than quantity.

From a search engine perspective when you exchange links for the sole purpose of improving the rank of your pages it's not really an honest endorsement for the other page. Search engines therefore don't want to count those links.

It doesn't mean you can't exchange links with other sites, but you should be exchanging links because visitors to each site might find the other site interesting or useful.

The way links are exchanged in the link exchange forum it's mostly the result manipulation kind of exchange. I say mostly because I'm sure there are some people who find mutually beneficial sites to trade links. Usually though the people in there will exchange links with anyone willing to give them a link.

That kind of linking tends to have marginal benefit at best and could lead to penalties in Google at worst.

What I like about it though is most of them are so clueless, they don't imagine that Google employees go around very many forums checking what sites are swapping random links etc, and then feed that data into the algo as seed data.

They don't need to look far to get footprints for just about every link exchange going.

Chris I've thought the same thing too.

Why not make 20 post required for link exchange

Originally Posted by goheadtry

Why not make 20 post required for link exchange

Probably because just like no-one listens to the web hosting offer rules, they would just spam. There should be a physical block - i.e. they cannot actually access the forum or post in it until they have enough posts.

What is worse than the link exchange forum is the people who drop links into other forum posts. Everyone wonders why the post doesn't make sense until you look at their sig.

The link exchange forum wouldn't bother me if it didn't show up in "New Posts"

Vangogh made it so posts in the Link Exchange Forum no longer show up when you click the 'new posts' link. That should clear up the issue for most of you.

Thanks

I hope that solves the problem of seeing the threads in that forum too often.

Thanks Vangogh and Tim. In an ideal world, the link exchange forum would be abolished but sadly we don't live in one so we'll have to grin and bear it lol