Link Exchange ("Reciprocal Link Exchange") is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody.

Link Exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the web. In the last few years, this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google. However according to some experts, search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links.

I have read topics on both sides of the coin - "a link is a link" and "relative links" in terms of SEO value. So, for those who advocate "a link is a link" then if I sell technology product, a link with a travel agency is as good as linking with another technology oriented site? Should PR enter into the decision? I'm leaning towards relevant links and at least a PR higher than "0".I guesss at the simplest level search is about matching a text query to "relevant" text on a website. Relevance is therefore at the core. A link from a relevant site should therefore carry more weight in the matching process than a link from a non-relevant site.

Link exchanges have advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of those using the World Wide Web for marketing. On the one hand, they have the advantages of bringing in a highly targetted readership (for link exchanges where all members of the exchange have similar web sites), of increasing the "link popularity" of a site with Web search engines, and of being relatively stable methods of hyperlinking. On the other hand, they have the disadvantages of potentially distracting visitors away to other sites before they have fully explored the site that the original link was on.

Link popularity is the ultimate parameter in achieving supreme exposure on the web for your web site. Link popularity is measured by the number and quality of the inbound links of your site. Inbound links helps to attain high search engine ranking for your web site.

Manual link exchange does take more time, but it's worth 10 fold more than an automatic link exchange service can offer. Dead links on your site or exchanging links with webmasters who are not reciprocating properly is of no value to you.

Relevancy is equally and sometime more important than PageRank for Google. For example, ABC is a web hosting company with pagerank 6. XYZ is a web hosting company with pagerank 8. ABC has more Inbound Links from similar theme websites (e.g. web hosting websites) compared to XYZ. I have noticed that ABC is doing better than XYZ in search engines. So, Google counts on relevancy more than PageRank.