Stop asking me to swap links - it’s bad for business

Startup Spark:

It seems just about every day lately, someone is emailing me to request a link swap.

And I have to say to all of you: STOP!

link swapping doesn't make sense I understand why you think swapping links will help you in your quest to be number one on the search engines. (It doesn’t… just read Rebecca Murtagh’s info on what makes Google’s search engine tick.)

When link swaps started, websites exchanged links with other websites that were complimentary to provide a useful resource for their own visitors. Nowadays, many webmasters will swap links with any site that will agree, or any automated link swap page. These reciprocal links are easily detected by the search algorithms and discounted as such. Trading links doesn’t show the same vote for the quality of your site as a link that isn’t reciprocated.

Then there’s another question: But folks, what’s in it for me? You get featured on a highly-ranked blog and Startup Spark gets… what? If you really want me to consider linking -or better yet - writing about you: you need to earn it.

And that takes savvy PR - not page rank - but public relations.
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