Why You Can’t Afford To Link Exchange (With Proof)
If you’re actively trying to exchange links with other webmasters, you are wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars. I’m going to lay it out for you in black and white and even let you experiment with your own numbers using the Link Exchange Cost Calculator.
A Quick Overview Of Exchanging Links
A link exchange, also called a link swap or a reciprocal link, is a simple concept from the early days of the web. Bob contacts Mary and offers to link to her website from his site if she will do the same in return. Voila, a link exchange!
The purpose of a link exchange used to be to send traffic from one site to another, but as search engines gained in popularity and usefulness, people discovered that the more links they had pointing to their site, the higher their site would rank in the search engines. Link exchanges multiplied, in some cases even morphing into link farms, pages with nothing but links pointing to other sites.
Of course, the search engines eventually caught on to this tactic. They began to add other factors into their ranking formula and over time, the power of a single backlink became diluted in comparison to what it once was. Links to your web pages are still a major part of getting them to rank well, but the effectiveness of the classic link exchange is dead.
Don’t believe me? Let’s put link exchanging to the test.
Quantifying the Process
First, you need to find good candidate websites to host a link. If you go with the first result in Google for your keyword, find a page on their site for your link, and navigate to their contact page, it will take at least 5 minutes. Add another 5-10 minutes to write a single email or message. It usually takes a day for most people to respond, but it can also be much longer or never.
Now factor in your success rate...Let's be ridiculously generous and say that half of the people you write to requesting a link actually respond and agree to exchange links. Then you'll need to write a thank you email and put their link on your site. 20 minutes.
By my count, for each link, with a success rate of 50%, that's going to take a minimum of 40 minutes of work, not counting time spent waiting for responses.
Now consider the following:
- The value you get from that link may or may not make any difference in your rankings. You may have to repeat the process tens or even hundreds of times to make a difference. 10 times? That's 400 minutes of work or 6 hours, 40 minutes. 100 links? Try 4000 minutes, which is 66 hours and 40 minutes.
- You aren't guaranteed to get the link text you want.
- The link could be taken down at any time and it takes additional time to constantly recheck to make sure your links are still there and remove the links on your page if they aren't.
- All of this work is for 1 page and you'll have to replicate it for each and every page on your site that you want to rank well. Getting 10 links for 10 pages on your site? Again, that's 4000 minutes of work.
- You aren't going to have a success rate anywhere near 50% in a link exchange request. You might get 50% to open your email and probably a third of those people will respond, a third will mark it spam, and a third will just delete and ignore it. If enough people mark your emails as spam, you could get blacklisted and your open rate will be closer to 10%. What's your conversion rate in that scenario? Around 3%. What does 3% mean in terms of work? It means that to get a single link, you'll have to find 33 sites and send out 33 emails. That's 340 minutes of work for each link, 3400 minutes for 10 links, and 34000 minutes for 100 links. That's 566 hours and 40 minutes or just under 24 complete days.
- If you are getting the highly competitive wage of $10 per hour, that means that a single link could cost anywhere between $6.67 (with a 50% success rate) and $58.33 (with a 3% success rate). Even if you had a 100% success rate, the link would cost $5.
- At $10 per hour, with a 100% success rate, 100 links will cost $500. If your success rate drops to 50%, the cost becomes $667. 25% costs $1000. At 3%, it’s $5,833. Make more than $10 per hour? Go ahead and adjust the figure accordingly.
After running those numbers, you should begin to see the true costs of a link exchange.
Your Honor, I Object
How to do a cost/benefit analysis on link exchanges
But wait, you say, those numbers are just estimates. There’s no way a link exchange takes that long. You can use form letters. Automatation. There are dozens of ways to shave time off the link exchange process.
Fair enough. If you’re still not convinced, I’ll let you prove it to yourself. You can see in the graphic the formula for calculating the cost of a link exchange. Feel free to substitute any of the numbers I gave as estimates for your own.
The Proof, As They Say, Is In The Pudding
To make things even easier, I’ve created the Link Exchange Cost Calculator that you can use to experiment with different combinations of numbers. Try it out below (all fields are required).
No Link Exchanges? But Now What?
There are better ways to get links to your website than by exchanging links, but what are they? The simplest answer is to create content and services that are useful and interesting. Make it easy to share by providing ways for people to email and bookmark your content. If you have a service, make customer service your number one priority.
Your reputation is your greatest asset online. Do good work and people will notice. Take care of your customers; they’ll remember and they’ll tell other people. A good reputation doesn’t mean you won’t have to do any marketing, but it does mean that the links and all the associated benefits will come easier and more naturally.
In future articles, we’ll examine the costs of different link building exercises and try to determine which are the most efficient and cost-effective. We also have a few more tools planned for later this fall that I think will really change the way you approach your website promotion.
The Challenge
As you’ve seen, the costs of doing link exchanges far outweigh the benefits. For only a few links, you could be paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars, even if you work for yourself. The practice is simply too expensive and it doesn’t scale well.
To end this article, I’d like to challenge you to apply a cost/benefit analysis on your own business. What other long-held beliefs have you been practicing? Have you broken down the process and analyzed the costs? Are the benefits high enough to continue business as usual? Where has your business been leaking money or how could you change your business practices to become more efficient?
Once you've done your business analysis, send me a message on Twitter with your results!