Link Building, Link Exchanges, and Ad Buys – What’s the Difference?

August 8, 2007

Part I: Link Exchanges

The word is out: having inbound links to your site is good. But what types of links are the best, and what is the difference between an ad buy, link exchange, and one-way link building?

Each linking method has its purpose. Which one you want to focus on depends largely on your end goal. Are you looking to simply get a quick increase in traffic, increase brand visibility, or improve your search engine rankings?

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is the practice of linking to another website in exchange for a link on that site to yours. For a time, this was a good way to increase your search engine rankings because search engines considered the number of links to your site as an important indicator of your site’s overall importance.

Webmasters would often create a links page where they would place their link exchange links, resulting many times in individual webpages containing hundreds, even thousands of links. The web also saw a propagation of “link farms” where a group of webpages all link to the other webpages within the group.

Link farms today are considered by most search engines to be a form of spam against search engine indexes. Spamming a search engine index in this manner often results in a site being penalized, lowering its search engine ranking or even getting black listed.

Link exchanges still have their place however. Two websites with complimentary services may agree to a link exchange where each site drives traffic to the other. When doing a link exchange, you always want to be wary that the number of outgoing links on any particular page does not get too high; otherwise a search engine may mistake your page for a link farm.

Link exchanges generally do not improve search engine ranking because search engines don’t consider a two-way link to be a good indicator of a site’s importance.

Part II: Ad Buys and Link Building

Ad Buys

An ad buy involves purchasing a link on a specific page, in a specific location. The advantage of this is that you have control over where and how your link appears. Placing links to your site from a website that a search engine considers to be important can give your site a boost in its search engine rankings.

Furthermore, having a link on a high-traffic site will result in referral traffic from that site.

Link Building

Link building is the process of placing one-way links to your site from other sites. Since search engines give a lot of weight to one-way links, this is a very effective method of increasing search engine rankings.

An understanding of link analysis is an important part of effective link building. Link analysis is what search engines do to determine the importance of a particular site in a particular category based on the links that point to it. The text contained around a link, as well as the text that is included as part of a link, are analyzed to determine this.

For example, the following text with a link will increase the target site’s importance for the keyphrase “green dog hair” slightly:

For information about green dog hair, click here.

However, much more weight is given to a link that includes the keyphrase within the linking text:

Get more information on green dog hair.

The main purpose of link building is to create many one-way links with a specific keyphrase in the link, thereby increasing the target site’s search engine ranking. The more one-way inbound links there are, the more important a search engine will consider your site to be in a particular subject. If you have enough links, then the search engine will assume that you are an authority on the subject and rank your site accordingly.

Another part of link analysis, though to a much smaller extent than the number of links, is analyzing where the link is coming from. If a site that is considered to be an authority links to your site, then it is assumed that you have some authority on the matter as well. However, since there are usually so few sites that are considered to be authoritative, having a large number of inbound links is still considered far more important that the referring site’s authority.

The purpose of link building, then, is not to increase referral traffic from related websites (though this will usually happen as a side effect), but to increase your search engine ranking by showing them that you are an authority on a particular subject.