Nowadays, Google uses advance technology that can actually tell if you are exchanging links with other websites.

Link exchanges are worthless.

That's the new buzz around, and its easy to tell why. Mega search engine Google can now tell if webmasters are exchanging links when determining a website's PageRank, and that link is actually devalued. How? As you may know, Google's determine's website PageRanks using a number of factors; one of the most important being the amount of links to your website.

If you think about it, the PageRank system Google created is ingenious for keeping out spam websites and other junk. Google encourages the results in their search engine to be what people like, and what people actually use, thus why Google's PageRank technology is determined heavily by the number of links to a website. The number of links is obviously created by an audience who appreciates and utilizes the website, but some are trying to cheat through link exchanges.

Now it's official: links exchanged between websites have lower weight. So if your website is site A and you exchange with site B, and site B in turn links back to your site A, then the links back to both of the websites have less weight than a one-way link.

Search engine gurus are now suggesting doing 3-way link exchanges to outsmart Google.

How does 3-way linking work?
3-way linking works doing the following: you make the request to a webmaster to exchange with your website (A), and then that webmaster says that he'll give you a link on his second website © if you link to his first website (B) on your website (A).

Do you see where I'm going? I apologize if this is confusing, but it's simple. Here, I'll try to explain in an equation:

A → B & C → A.

Guide: I am using the → symbol to represent linking. So, A links to B, and in return C links to A. That's three-way linking, and now there is no way Google can see that there is a link exchange going on, so the links being exchanged will have a higher weight.

If you have any questions about 3-way linking, please just ask, and I will try my best to explain.

Good luck to you all! Link power!

P.S. If you're doing a PageRank site link exchange, make sure that A, B, and C has the same PageRanks or basically it is to your benefit. Don't have a PR5 site linking to a PR3 site that in turn the guy is linking back to you on his PR1 site. Know what I mean?

P.P.S. As I'm sure you're all aware, Google can also penalize your site for what sites you link to. For example, if your site is an informational portal for children on the book "Moby Dick", and you're linking to some adult websites on that site, Google will penalize your website's ranking for this. I just had to add that to make sure everyone is well aware of that, and also to promote one idea: if you're going to exchange links, or link to other websites, please link to relavent websites!

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Update; Tuesday, June 27, 2006: Coincidentally while updating and managing my Bookmarks in Mozilla FireFox, I stumbled across a website I bookmarked a while ago regarding one-way linking:

http://www.OneWayTextLink.com/

Hope that helps any of you out who are interested in one-way linking; ie: free backlinks.

Wow!! nice article monarch.. thanks for sharing

Reciprocal linking is definitely must but regards to that, don't be linking to just anyone who wants to link with you. It doesn't matter if they have PR7, PR8, super high PR rating than you. You rather link your site with other sites that are similar topic/concept as your own site. This will drive your site's ranking much higher on the SE.

Yea i agree 1000000% When I had a site i NEVER got any trafic from link exchange maybe once in a great while someone would brease through to check it out but never register.

Hmm, I have always thought that exchanging links was a fast and efficient way of increasing your pagerank, until I read this article of yours. I think I might give a go at the 3-way linking method to one of my sites that is stuck at pagerank 3 for quite sometime now. This is a wonderful article and I will put it in my blog .

907Group: I agree somewhat with what you're saying. If you're looking for traffic or visitors, exchanging links with a relavent website isn't a bad idea. I just simply state that it's bad for search engine optimization, and will basically get you nowhere in search engines as there would be no advantage for you.

My simple rule is:

One way links for SEO..

Reciporicol links for human traffic..some recips give SEO benefit also but it is minimal so I stick to visitor numbers.

Yes, linking to just any old website doesn't earn you points in Google's eyes. The link has to be relevant and the page rank higher than yours.