Inbound links without link exchange

[ebloggy]

It seems as if Google may not fancy link exchange, or worse still, penalize you for black hat SEO.

What ways are there to get inbound links without link exchange?

One is through forums, the other is to ask (politely) sites which feature your categories that your site belong to to link to you.

I would be interested to know what other methods there are, sans paid advertising.

[behzad]

I think one method is publishing articles in article directories.

[Ferre]

Make sure that you have unique, and interesting content and add new articles regulary and backlinks grow natural. That's the most effective and cheapest way to go about it.

[Johan007]

Related link exchange is ethical and no SE should penalise you. I should not listen to what many SEO people say anymore without it being tested over time. Link exchange is proven to work and is ethical. Just try to link out to sites that are good and not just for link exchange.

[ebloggy]

Originally Posted by Johan007

Related link exchange is ethical and no SE should penalise you.

Agreed.

However, Google may seem to penalize inbound links for similar anchor text. Then again, if they do so, anyone can bring a competitor down with some effort.

[Johan007]

....similar anchor text is again questionable and not very anti spam when you think about it logically. How ales would you link to Google withou thinking about it!!!!

With TrustRank on its way linking out to related authority sites will prove to be a positive.

[ebloggy]

Originally Posted by Johan007

....similar anchor text is again questionable and not very anti spam when you think about it logically. How ales would you link to Google withou thinking about it!!!!

I had better start getting inbound links with varying anchor text.

[al2six]

link exchanges really aren't all that ethical if you think about it. Google is like a voting system. When you link to a site, you're saying i think this site is important and useful, so I'm voting for it.

So the highest ranking sites are the ones that get the most votes; the ones people think are the most important and most useful. When you exchange links, do you really make sure you think the other site is important and useful? No, you're just worried about the PR that's going to get transfered to your site.

with link exchanges, the sites with the most votes turn out to be the sites that have owners who sent out hundreds of "want to exchange links?" emails, not the sites people find more important and usefull. The link exchange is kind of abusing the system.

I'm not saying don't do link exchanges because they're unethical... i'm just saying you can see why search engines would look down upon them and devalue those links.

[Johan007]

Think it’s subjective. Many websites with related content exchange links because both sites have reach a descent level of content. I would not exchange links with a site with no related content.

In my other post ebloggy got me wrong. I don’t think varying link text will make much deference because people will only link to places like Google using the text Google and its only when you think about the variants you come up with “search” and “search engine”. I could be wrong but I dont see it as an issue.

[ebloggy]

I link to my website using 'free blog', and have gotten about 500 inbound links with that term.

Now if everyone links to me using 'free blog', Google might sense something fishy going on and penalize me. That is just a hypothesis, but I'm trying to figure out why my site suddenly plunged in the SERPs. This could be one of the reasons.

The other reason could be the sudden addition of some 8,000 outbound links in a day => penalized or sandboxed.

[Spiral]

Originally Posted by behzad

I think one method is publishing articles in article directories.

I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning this, I'd completely forgotten about this type of promotion. I'll be doing a lot of this for my new site, you are my hero.