Link Trading: Good Idea, or Waste of Time? - The Cons of Trading Links
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Link trading sounds great! Why doesn’t everyone do it? Link trading is often quick and easy to do, and offers the compelling possibility of increasing your own site’s traffic through advertising and search engine rankings. But it’s not all sunshine and roses when it comes to playing the link trading game.
Link trading offers aren’t rare, but they probably won’t be an everyday occurrence either. It’s possible that only a few sites will contact you for link exchanges, and the sites you contact with the same offer may not be receptive at all. If you go in search of link trading agreements, you could spend a great deal of time chasing deals that never come to fruition. It takes a lot of effort to find sites you’d like to trade with, and then you’ll have to wait for all the replies to start coming. Some sites may never answer and some may turn you down, which means you’ll have to search longer and harder for new sites to deal with. This turns link trading agreements into a veritable treasure hunt through cyberspace.
Link placement usually winds up being disappointing for exchangers. Sites that make it a point to search out link trading exchanges are often completely swamped in links. Sure, they’ll put a link to your site on one of their pages, but a lot of the time that page is already so crowded with links that even you have trouble finding your own site. This makes the chance of getting any increased traffic to your own site much more slim, especially if your link appears very far down on the page in question.
Don’t forget your end of the deal: they put your link on their site, now you put theirs on yours. Wherever you plan to bury this link on your pages, you will still be offering traffic an easy way to leave your site. Leaving your site is exactly what you don’t want your visitors to do. Each link you provide to someone else’s site is actually helping them increase their own traffic and revenue -- it doesn’t do a thing for your site when traffic leaves your own pages.
Link Trading 
