So I had a high-quality piece of content and a solid brand behind me. But for quite a few people, that wasn’t nearly enough to give me a link.
And I totally get where these people are coming from. I’m sending them a cold email and asking them to edit their article as if it is somehow incomplete without a link to my post. As that’s rarely the case, this can sometimes come across as mildly insulting.
The truth is, my link outreach email is nothing but a request for a favor—no matter how hard I try to hide it behind my carefully selected arguments. And when was the last time you did a favor for a total stranger whose email landed in your inbox? Let me guess. Never?
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you have to give something before you get something. Just one problem: giving pretty much anything in return for a link is considered a link scheme by Google—which can get you in trouble.
So what do you do with such replies?
Well, I don’t think there’s a way to win these people over and get a free editorial link. They’ve clearly decided that they want something in exchange, like money or a reciprocal link.
Paying for links is never a good idea. If someone readily agrees to exchange money for a link, they would probably link to almost anything as long as they’re getting paid. This kind of behavior creates a detectable footprint, which will sooner or later get picked up by Google and lead to a “link selling” penalty.
From there, all websites that the website has linked to will get red flags as suspects for buying links. Get enough of these red flags, and your website will get penalized for buying links.
So if you’ve purchased a few links and your positions in Google went up, don’t celebrate just yet. It might take a few months (or a fresh link spam update) for Google to penalize you for it.
As for “link exchanges,” they aren’t that bad, actually. We studied the frequency of reciprocal links a few years ago, and 73.6% of domains (in our sample size of 140,592) had reciprocal links.
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
Furthermore, 27.4% of the sites had at least a 15% overlap between the sites they link to and the sites that link to them.
In other words, it’s pretty common for websites to link to each other. So a legitimate link exchange between two valuable resources is unlikely to be flagged by Google as suspicious.
What really gets you in trouble is promiscuous link exchanges with random low-quality sites, resulting in ugly shoehorned links which bring zero value to your visitors.
All in all, it’s always better to stay on the safe side and ignore people who want to strike a deal with you. But if someone pitches you a high-quality resource that perfectly fits your content, exchanging links with them shouldn’t hurt your website.