You can easily score valuable links by looking at the people who are in your network as these people are more open to help you and these link partners are more reliable. Of course you can always check whether link partners still link back with a backlink tool such as Link Assistant, but it is still better to do business with people you can trust.
You can bet some of those reliable people in your network who have a site. Your network consists of your friends, colleagues, regular customers, partners, suppliers and industry organizations. The ideal situation is when the site of your intended link partner is related and not a competitor of your site. The chance that the site is related is often a bit smaller. Nevertheless, links from less and even unrelated sites can help if this is done in moderation and you do good link exchange. This is part of a natural link profile as it is normal for a site to have some unrelated backlinks as well.
Determine link value when exchanging links
First you will see how much link value your link partner will pass on to your site. If you have a tool that can calculate this like SEO SpyGlass then this is very easy. If you don’t have such a tool, you will have to make an estimate. Usually you don’t want to spend too much time on this. You can look at the Pagerank of the page where the link appears and possibly the Alexa rank to see how much traffic is coming to that page and can therefore continue to your site. Alexa is unfortunately not very reliable. Perhaps the owner of the site can give you insight into the figures provided by Google Analytics. You will then get a much more reliable picture of the visitor numbers. You will also have to check how many links there are on the link page because you are going to share the link value with those links. You have to look at both internal and especially the number of external links. So you divide the total link value by the number of links on the page.
If the link value is not completely evenly distributed, you can always choose to provide your link with a nofollow tag or to request an extra link from a different anchor text from another page, although this is not an ideal solution. is.
If you have made a reasonable estimate for yourself of the link value, it is wise to determine the keyword that you want to use in the anchor and title. Look at the rankings of your keywords and to determine which keyword rankings you want to improve. With Rank Tracker you can keep track of this nicely in a historical ranking overview so that you can later see what result the link exchange has yielded. Read more about determining the value of a backlink here.
Strategy link partner approach with reciprocal linking
Now that you have determined your anchor text and calculated link value, it is time to approach the link partner. What you do not want to do now is simply link to each other (reciprocal linking) because this is something that Google is not waiting for (although some reciprocal links also belong to a natural link profile). Google does not like that you will influence the rankings with link building. So if you now have too many reciprocal links, this is an indication that you are influencing the rankings. If you have few reciprocal links and the reciprocal links you have are related and link out to a Trusted site (high quality website), those few reciprocal links won’t hurt. Please note that reciprocal linking does not yield the same link value as a one-way link, so try to get as many one-way links as possible.
Ok, but no link partner without a link exchange, right I hear you say? No, you can satisfy your link partner in other ways. This can be done by offering your partner a service in return (promotion, purchase product or service) or maybe you have a hosted blog, directory or another site that you can link back to and thus set up a 3-way link system. You just have to be careful with linking back from your own site because if this site is hosted on the same IP, Google can still easily find out that you are linking back via a detour.
Protect 3-Way Link Building from Google with SEO Hosting
You can solve this by hosting your websites on different ip addresses and preferably different C-classes. You have special SEO Hosting for this. Please note that you want your servers to be located in the country of your target group, as Google ranks sites better in the country-specific Google (e.g. Google.nl for the Netherlands) when the hosting is located in this country (the Netherlands for Google.nl) . In addition, you can order Whois guard at Namecheap so that Google cannot find out who registered the domain name and then Google can no longer make a link with you as the owner of the website.