Exchanging links has been a common practice for some time now between webmasters that want to increase their search engine rankings. Lots of these webmasters trust their rankings solely to their link exchanges. The big problem with this is that these kind of links are known to be deprecated by search engines, and even Google is telling us not to do link exchanges in the webmaster guidelines. I remember when Google added to their webmaster guidelines that we shouldn't buy and sell text links, we all know how that ended.

This was what made me think about link exchanges and what would Google do with them. In my opinion, it is just a matter of time until Google starts penalizing (massively) the sites that have lots of link exchanges on them, the ones that increased their link popularity artificially by exchanging links in an abusive way.The other thing that came to my mind was that these kind of links were usually situated on the sidebar or the footer of pages. What I also remembered was that these kind of links were also deprecated by search engines for not looking natural.

These two things got me thinking on how we could still exchange links without getting penalized and without getting our links deprecated by search engines. Some ideas came to my mind, but the one I think was the best is the one of page exchanges, which would let webmasters still exchange links that  would also be relevant and not deprecated.

What would page exchanges consist on?  Webmaster A would get a link on a new page of webmaster B's website that would cover the topic of the site of webmaster A. The link would be situated into the article so that it looks more natural. This way, the link would be relevant and not deprecated. In exchange, webmaster B would get a link on a new page of webmaster A's website that would cover the topic of webmaster B. The most important thing here would be that both sites would have to be inside the same niche; this way, both would be getting highly relevant links, content would look natural, and both would be getting a great article on their website.

In case you got a bit confused by my explanation, this graphic will hopefully make you understand this concept better:


Want to be really sure that Google won't penalize you?  What I used to do when doing link exchanges was cross linking. This would be:

Site A (webmaster 1) links to site B (webmaster 2) and site C (webmaster 2) links to site D (webmaster 1)

This is probably the best way of exchanging links, as it is very difficult to get caught. The only problem with this type of link exchange is that we would probably not be getting relevant, non-deprecated links, as they would be placed on websites of any topic and on footers (probably). We can apply this cross link exchange method to page exchange too; the only thing we would need here would be 4 websites of the same topic or 2 pairs of websites of the same topic. Page A (from Site A) of Webmaster 1 would link to Webmaster 2's website (Site B), and page C (from Site C) of webmaster 2 would link to another of webmaster 1's website (Site D).

In case my explanation was not clear enough, this graphic, I shall clarify:

If you want to do page exchanges, there are some extra considerations you should take into account:

• Internal Linking.  In which part of the website will the new page get linked from? Getting linked directly from the homepage would definitely be the best, but you could also agree with the other webmaster on linking to it from inner pages. Just be sure you are both linking in the same levels and make sure the other webmaster is linking to the page from somewhere.
  
• Same Niches.  This is pretty important for many reasons. The first one is visitors -- if they see an article that has nothing to do with your site, they will probably get a bad impression of it. Another reason would be search engines, as they might also see you are linking to a website that has nothing to do with your site's niche. Remember that if you keep it under the same niche, it will look more natural and it would be much harder to get caught.
• Onsite SEO of the new page.  On the new page that would be created at the other webmaster's website, try to include the keywords you will be using as anchor text on the title tag, heading tags, and the content of the article. Don't forget to use these keywords as your anchor text and to put the link inside the content of the article.

Wait! Does this also mean I can sell pages? Exactly! If you just sell pages to websites that are in your niche, there is no way you can get penalized (just make sure not to say that someone paid for that page to be there or that you are selling pages on your website), as you are giving users content-rich articles plus links to get more information about that topic. Happy Page Exchanging!