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The more they stay the same
Eight years ago, when I started my amateur paysite, it was an unwritten law that, if you wanted to succeed then you needed to exchange links with every other amateur paysite you could find. You had to do that so that you could get traffic to your site from the surfers who visited other people's sites.

It was straight reciprocal linking and you needed it if you were to build up the membership your own site. Basically, if you didn't link then you didn't get much traffic because search engine placement wasn't a big deal and very few amateurs back then were into building free sites and galleries or having affiliates either.

These days linking is still important but not because it will bring you much in the way of traffic from those links. Instead the more inbound links you can get out there the more Google likes you and the higher your site is going to rank in the search engine results pages for the terms you're targeting.

Back when I started it was just a matter of emailing other amateurs and offering a reciprocal link and things happened. But these days reciprocal links are seem to have fallen out of favor as Google gives more importance to one-way links and that means that they're much harder to get.

In the last few years mainstream has discovered the importance of inbound links too. While Google seems to have a naive view of inbound links and thinks that inbound links will come naturally because people will like a site so much that they'll put up a link mainstream sees things more clearly.

Groveling and Crawling
If you're in mainstream and you want an inbound link from a site then you need to go out and ask for it. Of course, how you do that can vary. A year or so ago we seemed to go through another cycle of those crappy emails that suggested that the sender thought your site was a great fit for a link and if you put a link to their site on your index page they would put a link back to your site on some obscure page no one ever visited.

I understand those are still going round but fortunately our spam filters seem to catch all of the ones sent to us. And the fact that ordinary people and SEO experts still do the email thing trying to drum up inbound links shows you just how important inbound links really are. But the standard of link-to-me emails was always going to improve when the mainstream SEO companies got involved.

Well at least I had hoped they would but recently one leading SEO expert posted on his blog the sort of text that his company used when it went begging for inbound links. I have to admit to being surprised because in lots of ways the ‘professional' approach wasn't much better than the garbage I talked about earlier.

At least it didn't offer a reciprocal link on a page no one would ever see. Instead it approached the question of asking for a link in a way that almost made me want to throw up. If you have been around the Net for a while you just know that anyone who writes to you and tells you in one breath how wonderful your site is and in the next asks for a link is not genuine at all.

Perhaps I'm just rather jaundiced in my view of the world but when I read the sort of email this guy sends out just turns me off. If you want a link from me then be up-front about it and don't bullshit about it. I'm more inclined to give someone a link if the site deserves it - not because someone came crawling, sucked up to me and tried to make me feel important.

A Straight Approach?
Steve saw a slightly different approach with a link request he got the other day. The writer was up-front and told him that he was working for a client who wanted to obtain some inbound links from sites that were in the same field as his client. But he didn't score a link either.

Steve was half-inclined to give him the link he wanted simply because the email was straight forward and not full of bull shit but first he wandered over to client's site and found an online computer store. He also found that the client had an affiliate program - no mention was made of that in the email so that was the end of the line as far as a reciprocal link was concerned.

Of course Steve could have joined the affiliate program and was going to ... until he read the terms of service and found that the site only set a 3-day cookie. That was the sign that it was time to leave the site and trash the email.

Back before inbound links were so important from a search engine point of view we exchanged links because there was some perceived value in doing so. We got some traffic out of it at the very least and that traffic could always convert into sales.

However, these days when the best link is a non-reciprocal inbound link what value can we offer to the other site to encourage them to give us that link?

I'm not sure what the answer is to that one but if link-seekers were able to offer some value - apart from monetary - in return for an inbound link the SEO people would not have to resort to bull shit to get the links they need.