Link exchanges are a great way to get links to your web site. However, it is a time consuming and tedious process and there are more than a few webmasters that are involved in shady practices when it comes to link exchanges.

The time consuming and tedious aspect of link exchanges are:

1. Link hunting - finding suitable web sites to engage in link exchanges.
2. Contacting the webmaster for a link exchange - through an email or link submission form.
3. Putting up links to the web site you are requesting a link exchange.
4. Waiting for the webmaster to respond.
5. Checking periodically for your link on your partner’s site.

Out of the above list of time consuming and tedious aspects of link exchanges, the last point, “Checking periodically for your link on your partner’s site” would take the most amount of time. Checking for your link on your partner’s site involves more than just looking for the presence of your link on their site (which also takes a great deal of time since they may move or remove your link and not tell you). You need to check that the link they use for your web site is a valid static HTML link and that the webmaster is not using any shady link exchange practices.

Shady link exchange practices includes:

1. The use of meta tag “NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”
2. The use of javascript
3. The use of redirects
4. Using robots.txt to block link pages or directories from search engine robots
5. Orphaned link pages or directories
6. Using new attribute “rel=nofollow”
7. Using frames or iframes

The time consuming and tedious aspect of link exchanges is one of the reasons why many internet businesses choose to buy text links. Buying text links is the quickest and most efficient method to obtaining thousands of links to your web site in a short amount of time. This can greatly and quickly boost your link popularity and search engine rankings.