Link exchange and how to check if you’re getting a deal!

Ok here are some tips for you all to live by.

It makes me sick when someone asked for a link exchange with one of my sites but that person is a complete and total liar.

Today for example I get 2 emails today 1st No, No your in my bad books, 1 is enough, sure follow up if you like a week or so later but not 2 in the same day is not the way to go about it.

Anyway this person we will call him Ian as that's his name, sends me an email and I quote missing out his URL as I don't think he needs any free publicity.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Hi There,

I have just visited your site and was wondering if you would consider exchanging links with my site www.******-*****.com which attracts over 5,000 UK Racing Enthusiasts a month.

If possible please could you include the following and in return we will place a link to your site on ******-*****.Com

URL - www.******-*****.com
Title - ******-*****.com is a UK Based Betting Advisory Service that specialises in supplying its clients with a regular supply of decent priced winners.

Kind Regards

Ian Burrows[/quote]

Anyway first things I note is he is using a standard email to everyone (I got 2 remember) and not a very good one at that, sure we all use a standard template but really guys, if your going to ask at least take the time to make it a little more custom.

So reading the email you think, wow pretty good going 5,000 of the people I am looking for is on his site a month, that's great.. Brilliant place for a link I would say.. But wait.. My Google PR says not listed.. What not listed and 5,000 folk a month is on his site, no this can't be.. mmm lets whois the domain.. mmm domain is 7 days old so site will be lucky to be online 5 days.. So where did the 5,000 a month come from.. Oh I know thin air.

Really this guy must think I am a right plonker... anyway, main problems with this email are he didn't tell me what I was going to get, or why I should exchange links with him, plus he lied and was easy to find out.

Anyway this post is really to warn you about people who make up magical tails in the hope of getting your valuable traffic and better listed on search engine because of your hard worked for PR rating.. Don’t be a fool, checkout who you link to.. 1 quality link out weight 100 crap ones like this.

Agree Clarke.

I tend to reject all link exchange requests unless they have PR4 or above.

Clarke I got the same email, the difference is that I added his link without checking google rank or link popularity because I was very busy that day. Both rank & popularity were not up to much so his link has been terminated with immediate affect...

(I always wanted to say that )

Just deleted the same email.

Obviously a harvested email address (thats why you got it more than once).

I get a few, come through on all email addresses, in the bin

You could also check out the site's approx. traffic figures by going to www.alexa.com. I go by the following rule of thumb (comments please):

Google PR:
0 - avoid like the plague, may well have been chucked out for spamming. (unless you know it's a new site)
1,2,3 - not really up to much
4 - c.10 links - maybe worth exchanging with if they are linking to you in a way which is relevant to your subject, not just #53 on a list of hundreds of random sites. Your link could be very important to them.
5 - c.20-50 links - an "average" site
6 - c. 100 links+ - the benchmark I generally aim for
7 - they should have c. 1000 inbound links, and be a pretty major player in their field. (Or they are cunningly cheating the page rank by having just a few links where they are the only ones on the page.)
8+ should need no comment from here upwards!

I am guessing that Alexa works on a log (10) scale aswell:

Alexa:

Top 10 sites - 10m
Top 100 -1m+
Top 1000 - around 100,000 visitors per day
Top 10,000 - 1,000
Top 100,000 - 100
Top 1,000,000 - 10

Most new sites will not display a 0 PR, they will be greyed out.

I'm not really that Alexa works. My site has a rank of around 500,000 yet pulls in between 1,500 and 3,000 visitors a day. The site has 1 pr of 7, several other 6's and the rest 5's.

When you add in the fact the many sites ban the Alexa bot from spidering them. Plus I don't know of many people who surf using the Alexa toolbar.

PR might be a good indicator, Alexa is certainly not.

PR is not an indicator of traffic at all. It may make a difference to traffic, with many other variables, but means little on it's own.

I agree that its not enough on its own, but I don't place any faith in Alexa. I guess the only thing to do is take all of these indicators into consideration and then use your judgement to make your decision. That or ask for their logs of course :-)

Alexa says my site's traffic rank is 2,907,929.

I wish

I assume it's 'cos I got an expired domain (my site only went live a couple of weeks ago and gets naff all traffic as yet).

It seems that many sites get 4.5 stars out of 5 and a 111,111 ranking with 79 other sites link to them. Must be a magic figure or something...

dont lose site of the fact that alexa is spyware
www.internet-tips.net/Tan..._alexa.htm