Finding one-way links with a link exchange – Without cheating

Many webmasters use more or less automated link exchanges to increase the number of inbound links to their websites. Even though reciprocal linking may prove successful for some websites, using the same services to attract one-way links would of course be a better idea. In fact, using the right services may very well leave you with inbound links to any or all of your websites, not just the one exchanging links.

As webmasters begun to understand the importance of inbound links, the services offering likeminded webmasters to exchange links have grown in numbers. Some are completely automated, others are just directories where you can find website owners likely to be interested in exchanging links. Some services have taken it one step further and are rewarding users who are promoting the service. This is made possible by an affiliate program. Some services offer a monetary reward, while others will give you links.

The two services I have tried for this experiment are Link2me and Link-Vault, two completely different services that, in this particular case, complement each other very well.

Where Link2me is a traditional, semi-automated link exchange where you manually add links to your pages, Link-Vault are utilizing a script to place all links. Link-Vault isn’t a link exchange where people do reciprocal linking; it’s more of a huge link pool, filled with pages from all over the world. You link to a few sites, and other sites link back. In theory it’s a brilliant idea, and it gets better as the link pool grows.

In order to gain inbound links, you need to earn vaultage. The vaultage is the calculated into inbound links according to some formula. Earning vaultage can be done in two ways;

Adding the script to your pages and referring other webmasters to Link-Vault. This is where Link2me becomes useful.

When using Link2me, you are given the opportunity to specify your link page(s) for every potential link exchange. Using this feature will make many of the webmasters you ask for a link exchange to take a look at the specified page where you have placed the referral URL to Link-Vault in a prominent place.

Every visitor to that page will be a webmaster obviously interested in link exchanges, otherwise they wouldn’t be using Link2me in the first place. This interest is what you are taking advantage of when placing a link pointing to Link-Vault, it can’t be more on-target than this.

Considering Link2me’s 5 free exchanges/day and unlimited websites, you can make very good use of this even if you choose not to upgrade. If you, like I did, do upgrade you will get an unlimited number of requests. Asking everyone WILL give you quite a bit of visitors, all interested in link exchanges.

To sum it all up, here is what you need to do;

Join Link-Vault and get referral code

Add code to your link page(s)

Join Link2me, specify your link page and request link exchanges with as many websites possible.

Doing this a few times will give you plenty of referrals and thus plenty of free inbound links.