Psychic Readings › Link exchange with link builders from India

Link exchange with link builders from India

These are very important questions that every website owner or webmaster has to answer. You will find whole bunch of articles that will tell you how link exchange is important and at the same time whole bunch of articles that will tell you how link exchange is absolutely worthless. So, whom to trust?

I want to write my personal experience. I am professional webmaster and also a SEO enthusiast (for at least 10 years). When I recently published my two hobby sites PsychicReadingsWorld.com and xTarot.com, I was pretty surprised how many link exchange offers I have suddenly received. Most link exchange offers were from India and curiously with the same wording but from different senders. The common version of this link exchange offer was:

Email from India

Hello Webmaster,

I visited your web site earlier today and firstly wanted to congratulate you on the appearance, excellent content and accessibility I discovered there. It is not often I come across a web site that offers such a positive user experience and great information too.

At this present moment, I am seeking meaningful links from quality websites just like yours, for a current project on behalf of … (some website url). As you will see, this is based upon a similar theme to yours and does in my view, offer added value content for web site visitors.

Now as a part of this promotional activity, I would very much like to have a link featured on your website. Should you be agreeable, please use the following details to add the project site to your links page.

… (here comes the Title, URL and Description for the link exchange)

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate in contacting me by replying to this email. I will then get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks and Regards,

Link Manager

My own experience with link exchange

Because I like new things I have decided after some hesitation to agree to this offer. Approximately five other link builders from India contacted me during 2014. All of them with the same or very similar letter. It was strange but was not able to find out if they are independent or if they work in one company.

Nevertheless, I started to exchange links with them. These link builders from India offered me always some links with the proportional ratio 1:1, one my back link (3rd party, not the customers site) for one link targeted to their customers site. I was not satisfied from time to time with the offered back link and sometimes I refused the customers link, because of the poor page quality. In other words: I did not exchanged blindly every link as a fool.

Nearly after a year I found out that half of the back links, which should point to my site, were gone. I started to think this issue over. I can imagine and understand that the strategy of link building from India is focused only on short term. They are too far away to face some real consequences. So, they do not care much about the maintenance of the links. But very soon a I recognized two important things.

First: These link builders from India were not able to offer me any new interesting back links which I would consider as valuable. They supplied me with only very suspicious pages like http://www.goedbegin.nl/ or http://www.jouwpagina.nl/ which are not written in English but in Dutch language. I had the feeling that they run out of genuine sites and they have only these strange link farms as backup. I started to feel that this is probably the beginning of the end of my link exchange with these strange link builders from India.

Second: After a while I noticed very significant drop in page traffic. Suddenly more then 80% were gone. To be fair I have to say that visits of my site doubled during the year I when have exchanged links with link builders from India. But now the fall was so enormous that it could not justify meaningfulness of the further link exchange. (I have not exchanged links with anyone else and my site consist only from original and high quality texts, so the reason for penalization is obvious).

Google analytics and webmaster tools traffic drop

I have decided immediately quit the link exchange and delete all the outgoing links from my site. Even if Google claims that they penalize only for the the incoming links and not for the outgoing, I wanted to be sure and have peace in my mind. I need to live with the feeling that I got rid of everything related to the link exchange with link builders from India.

I received earlier a request to withdraw one link from my page because one link builders client was penalized by Google. So, I could be more suspicious earlier, but unfortunately I was not.

At the end of my description I can recommend you only to be very cautious to whom you will entrust your link building. This was only my bad experience and I do not want to generalize it. But as Google improves its algorithms everyday I am afraid that this kind of artificial link building (link exchange via special list on your site) will work less and less. Google recommends to have natural link portfolio and obviously you can not have such by artificial means. I do not want to dispute what is natural and what is artificial link building. I only want to appeal to common sense.

It is clear, that if you hire some link builder from India, you want quickly and positively affect your website traffic. And that is surely not very natural. More natural is, if you make a very good content and people will notice it and link to you freely and willingly, because they think your site is valuable. This second options will take time, but I am convinced it is the only right one!

I wish all the best to the link builders from India, but please do not contact me any more.

And I wish all the best to the site owners and webmasters. Make the valuable content and I hope you will be rewarded with great traffic. If you think my site is useful and valuable, please link to it. But do not demand any reciprocal back link.