Legitimate link requests

When I first started my personalized children's books web site madluckbooks.com, I read a lot of SEO (SEO = search engine optimization or some such) "how to" sites and books which recommended that the best way to get noticed by the search engines was to go out and get as many reciprocal links as possible. The more the merrier was the view point and it didn't matter where you got them from. One site or book suggested that you do a search on Google and yahoo to find out what sites were linking to your competitors than contact them and get them to link to your site. So I followed the instructions and contacted as many sites as I could and asked them to exchange links with me. After a while I had twenty or thirty links on my "links" page, and about 5 or 10 links back to me. The problem with requesting reciprocal links (or link exchanges) is that you have to link to the site first and hope that they follow up with a link back to you. It is time consuming, making the requests and putting the links up and making sure they link back to you and taking the links down if they don't.

Then I started reading elsewhere that reciprocal links weren't so great, especially if the sites you were linking to were considered link farms (IE sites that spasmodically link to everyone and anyone) or if they were unrelated to your site (like a link from a mattress company to my personalized book website.) Better than these links would be a one way link from a site or blog that linked to you because they like your content, or they were reviewing your product on their site.

So I more or less put my link exchange program on hold and stopped sending out the "link to me please" emails. Over the last year I have received a few requests to exchange links, usually from spam sites that I wouldn't be caught dead linking to. But I did recently get my first "legitimate" link exchange request from a site that sold a related product (educational children's toys), and had a decent PageRank from their links page. So after hesitating for a week or so, I added the link to mytoysmart.com. I'll keep an eye on them to make sure they keep my link up. One down side from them - they have over a hundred out bound links from their link page which make a link from them not as valuable...