Automatic Link Exchange : Be Careful.
Yes, not all automatic link exchange programs are as good as they are made out to be. Some can do your website serious damage. i.e get banned from the search engines database.
Any program that asks you to paste some code into your web pages directly that creates you automatic incoming links is cheating in the search engine eyes. Don’t do it.
It is ok to use automatic link exchange programs where you have to search for partners, contact them and then exchange links manually.
It’s best to join them and wait for other people to contact you, this saves time and you know that they are serious about exchanging links, nothing worse than searching for link partners, then emailing them and never receive a reply. Only exchange with quality related websites.
What are Automatic Link Exchange Programs?
Lets be honest, you read somewhere that you need lots of incoming links to rank high in the search engines (not necessary true). You realised that this is going to be very time consuming and look for a quick fix.
You then read about automatic link building programs that will create you lots of incoming links while you sit back and relax. Sounds fantastic and is very easy to fall into this trap.
Automatic link exchange programs also known as link farms is any group of websites that all link to others websites in that group to gain search engine exposure. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automatic programs and services where only the website that offers this service normally benefits.
Automatic link building programs (link farms) is a form of spamming the index of a search engine. There are genuine link exchange systems, that are designed to allow webmasters to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and these are not considered a form of spamdexing.
Google and Link Farms
We all know that Google is the big daddy of the internet and when the Google search engine became popular, search engine optimisers learned that Google’s ranking algorithm depended in part on a link weighting scheme called pagerank.
Instead of just simply counting all incoming links equally, the pagerank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight than others. Link farming was then adapted to help increase pagerank of members pages.
However, even the link farms became susceptible to manipulation by Webmasters who joined the services, received incoming links, and then found ways to hide their outbound links to avoid posting any links on their websites at all. Link farm services owners had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.
The battle continued between these link farms and Google and still is going on, but if Google realise you are involved with any automatic link exchange programs then it has been known that they will completely remove your domain from their database.
Conclusion
Stay away from automatic programs that will exchange links for you, search engines such as Google recommend you request links to your website from relevant websites. In other words start a link campaign and do it manually. At all costs stay away from link farms as you could end up with your website being penalized by the search engines.