I get a lot of e-mails like this one:
I am the webmaster at blahblah.com and I think our sites are a great match. Would you like to trade links with me?
The answer is no.
As a search engine optimization device, link trading is worthless. So are so-called ‘link triangles’, where you link to someone who links to someone else who then links to you.
At best, Google and other search engines will ignore you. At worst, they’ll ban you for trying to trick them.
Trust me. Link. Trades. Don’t. Work.
On the bright side, you can stop putting time into that ‘resources’ page on your site…
Links trading is NOT worthless. As long as you do it with sites that are directly linked with yours.
Hi Anghus. I over-generalized here. Link trades with sites that have nothing to do with yours don’t work. And the search engines really downgrade any link-for-link trades. But relevant links from relevant sites can help, even if you are trading a bit.
Check out Matt Cutts’ blog if you don’t believe me:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline