Hey, Welcome to Linkly, we are a community of 3000+ white-hat link builders helping in reversing the funnel of link exchange. Instead of spending hours and hours scouring the link exchange opportunities and cold emailing them, you can join Linkly, get direct access to link-building opportunities, filter them according to your niche, DA and 10+ other filters and build reciprocal Links.
But, what is link-exchange?
Reciprocal link-building or link exchange is a method where websites agree to give backlinks to each other. It’s a bit like saying, “You link to me, and I’ll link to you.”
It’s been going on for a long time and is one of the biggest tools for link builders to build quality backlinks.
Here’s what google has to say about it.
There isn’t a clear stance by Google on this, to be honest, but, they do state that excessive Link Exchange can cause a problem. The keyword is “excessive” here
Generally, Link exchange isn’t problematic but you should only exchange links with white-hat websites. Those websites that are compliant with Google’s webmaster guidelines and involve no fishy tactics.
H2 Here’s how to identify and steer clear of a problematic website.
To Identify whether exchanging backlinks with a website can cause a problem, you should consider the following factors:
1. Relevancy: The website you are sharing links with should be relevant to your niche. Link exchange is a natural product of being on the web, Ahrefs claim that they don’t do any link exchange however they still have a whopping 20% of all backlinks as reciprocal backlinks. But. keep in mind relevancy is important, that’s why we let you filter websites by niche on Linkly.
2. High DR, Low traffic: Usually some websites use black-hat practices like PBNs to artificially boost their DR but the traffic is low, we advise you to stay clear of such websites and Don’t exchange links with them. At Linkly we let you filter websites by DA and then you can see the page views for them as well before sending in the link exchange request.
3. Spammy Content: Avoid websites with spammy and AI-generated content also keep an eye out for keyword stuffing (Overloading a webpage with irrelevant keywords.
4. Exorbitant amount of backlinks: If a website has exorbitant amount of backlinks and little to no traffic, it’s probably in your best interest to stay away from it. That’s whzy at Linkly we also show you the No. of backlinks and no. of domain a website links to along with its pageviews. Black hat backlink tactics are all about manipulating the system to get backlinks quickly, often prioritizing quantity over quality. These practices violate search engine guidelines and can get your website penalized or even banned. So, you should avoid them at all costs.
You must be wondering if it’s worth it to go through all this trouble of scouring and exchanging links:
Ahrefs, took a close look at 140,000 websites, each getting at least 10,000 visitors from Google every month. They checked which websites were linking to others and how many times. The result? A whopping 73.6% of websites were into reciprocal linking – quite a popular move! Ahrefs found that about 19.25% of their linked websites naturally reciprocate the favour.
As we said this indicates that link exchange is natural and that’s why Google uses the word “excessive” to explain the problem associated with it, Long story short random, excessive and irrelevant link exchange is bad for your SEO but not the practice of Link-Exchnage itself.
Ahrefs also studied the top-ranking pages for different searches. They picked 10,000 random searches where the topics weren’t about specific brands. The goal was to see if the top-ranking pages had any reciprocal links. The result? Almost 44% of those top pages had links going back and forth.
Here’s how we at Linkly vet websites to make sure you only get good opportunities:
We at linkly.digital manually vets everyone who joins our community to check whether their websites and the backlinks they provide are white-hat or not.
We also check whether they link to any adult, casino or gambling website as well to avoid any and all red flags. With the help of our inverted funnel approach, you’ll find 1000+ opportunities for your Link Exchange needs at your disposal.
Alright, now its up to you to decide whether a small investment is worth saving the hours you’d spend scouring on the Internet and if you are still not sure, click here and upload your website to get access to 10% of LInkly’s link vault.
Thank you and happy link-building.