What porn webmasters do when they're high on painkillers...
Last night I posted some painkiller fueled questions to Twitter about link exchanges.
Traffic or SEO?
There are a few benefits to doing link exchanges. If the link comes from a high traffic site, you’ll get click-throughs; especially if your link is well placed. Also, there is an SEO benefit; search engines rank your site, in part, based on the number and quality of sites that link to you. So you’re riding on the coattails of those who link to you.
I have mostly focused on the SEO aspect of link exchange.
My early experience with directory submissions did drive traffic to my sites, but it wasn’t useful traffic. I may have had people reading, but they weren’t buying. The traffic I was getting wasn’t “pre-qualified” as a sales friend explained. People coming from directories know they can click back and get another link to more free porn; they aren’t looking to sign up.
In niche click-throughs from a non-directory site are better. The people who are coming to you are interested in the subject and hopefully more inclined to sign up. Depending on the relationship you have with that site, there might even be a share of the profits; for example, if you’ve used my affiliate signup link, why wouldn’t I feature you prominently on my site and hope that any sales I don’t make go through you? (Side note: if you do use our signup, let me know and I’ll link to you)
How to arrange exchanges?
There’s also the question of how to arrange the link exchanges. You could browse other sites in your niche and see if they have a link exchange contact page then hook up with them over email or ICQ. You can browse webmaster forums. Or you can use a 3rd party site that connects people purely for link exchanges and either monitors links to ensure they’re still live (Like Adult Link Hub) or even a site that lets you embed code on your site and they handle adding or removing links for you (Like Adult Link Exchange ).
If you do embed something on your site, remember that your sites performance is now impacted by their site. If they have problems, your page will be slow to render, or links won’t display.
I generally prefer Adult Link Hub; its easy to use and doesn’t take much maintenance. The problem is that you aren’t guaranteed quality sites. Be sure to vet the pages you’re linking to… What is their alexa / google page rank? Are they helping you? Or are you the one helping them?
Better quality link exchanges will likely come from forums or by searching for sites in your niche and contacting the webmaster directly.
So, what do you think? Do you like link exchanges for the traffic boost or just for SEO? Do you use a 3rd party site to arrange your exchanges? Forums? Email / ICQ? Do you build the links yourself, or embed something on your site to do it for you?
