When did people lose focus?

[mobilebadboy]

Pagerank. I personally wish it had never been created. It has completely ruined normal website practices. When I started doing websites more than a decade ago, peoples' main concern was getting TRAFFIC to their site not PAGERANK for their site.

Every time I go looking for link exchanges (no this is not a thread for offers) I see the same old "will trade links.....BUT, your site must be Pagerank of X"...."will trade links, but only with pagerank of X or higher". What? Pagerank is not going to create interactivity on your site. Pagerank is not going to purchase your products or click your ads or recommend your site to a friend or family member to get more traffic to your site.

Give me 1000 hits a month from a PR0 site before you give me 100 from a PR8 or PR9 site. Link me from 200 PR0 sites with traffic before you link me from 1 or 2 PR9 sites. Traffic matters to me, it always has. I want visitors not some status symbol that has ruined the true focus of what a website is supposed to be about and created for. I used to be able to spend 30 minutes finding webmasters to trade links with and I'd get traffic instantly. All of a sudden my new site with no PR isn't worth trading links with? Give me a break. That's ok, in the end I'll send YOUR traffic to SOMEONE ELSE.

Granted I've even found myself falling into the stupor of that little green bar over the last few months, but I've already unchecked that little box in the Options (I'd completely remove the toolbar had it not become quite handy to me for actual searches). It's sad that this is what it's all come down to. Some little f'n green bar.

/end rant

[MarkB]

Agreed - one reason why I'm always frustrated with people talking about buying page rank for new sites. It's not going to get you new visitors in a hurry, but networking with a bunch of similarly-themed sites, and trading links purely because it'll interest your visitors, will benefit everyone.

[Chris]

Of course how much traffic does a link exchange really get you?

No high traffic site is going to exchange links with a new or low traffic site. Its just not going to happen. Also the more popular and corporate a site gets the less change they will do link exchanges at all, usually to protect their brand.

Before PageRank even existed I did not like link exchanges simply because they produced so little results. Plus I always thought the idea of a "links" page to be kinda silly and detrimental to the exchange as a whole.

I still dislike exchanges, but I do have a couple. I don't have a "links" page on any of my sites but I do some in-context exchanges. When I'm looking for a link exchange partner PageRank does matter, but only if the pages I am looking at are really really low. If they're 0 I won't do it at all incase the site is banned. Otherwise the most important things I look for are page topic and what kind of anchor text I can get.

I also tend to put such links low on the page so I figure that if someone has read that far and then leaves my site they probably would have left anyways, so any traffic I'm getting through the exchange, even if small, is a bonus.

Still, like I said, I don't do very many exchanges.

[MarkB]

A lot of my earlier sites' traffic was (were?) built on link exchanges (although, usually more sites linked to me than I linked to... but I tended to create 'core' sites that other sites instinctively sent users to).

[chrispian]

I'm not worried about PR for link exchanges. Like Chris, I don't trade with PR 0, just in case they are banned. I also don't link to get visitors though. Even if I got 100 a month it's not really worth it. I do trade though because the links from these other sites mean I'll show up higher in SERPS, so I can see PR being important. But I only look at two things when I trade links. 1. Is the site banned? 2. Is it related to my site in some way. If it's not banned and related to my sites I'll usually do the trade. I don't mind helping out new sites. I remember how hard it was. If I can help a site get established then that's another long term quality link for me.

People do seem a bit obsessed with PR though, and I blame that on SEO's. Not all of them, but most are always blathering on about PR link exchanges.

[r2d2]

Pagerank. I personally wish it had never been created. It has completely ruined normal website practices.

Whilst I agree there are lots of Page Rank 'sell outs' around and the web dev world would probably be healthier without it, I do think PageRank is good, just that Google maybe shouldnt have decided to make it publicly visible. I bet 99.9% of normal web users dont know what it means - theres loads of webmasters around who dont even understand it.

[intelliot]

unfortunately, it increases your chances of getting indexed earlier/more often.

[mobilebadboy]

Like I said, a decade or more, I've been doing link exchanges and I've been getting (and sending) traffic. Because I don't have a pagerank on a new site does NOT mean I'm not getting traffic and not sending traffic out. That used to not matter. But people don't want to trade links with me now because I have no PR. That's fine. As mentioned, I'll send that traffic to someone interested in traffic, not a green bar.

Link exchanges nowadays are just becoming harder to get because of Pagerank. I don't even email and request exchanges much like I used to because I have this voice in the back of my head that they'll look at my site, see I have no PR and refuse.

I'm not talking links pages, I'm just talking a few exchanges between alike sites. I dont even run links pages, excluding the resources page on my visual intensity site, but there's no exchange there, just me linking out to sites that may be of interest to my visitors to that site.

Front page exchanges used to happen like clockwork, no questions. Now it's some sacred holy ground that's run by a little bar provided by Google and it's some sort of priviledge to be linked there.

[Kyle]

I think a good solution to this is a modification of the google toolbar. Having it no longer show pagerank, but instead telling you detailed information about 'banned sites' and 'bad neighborhoods'.

So webmasters will know: whether the website is indexed, banned, or is considered a bad neighborhood. They will make their decisions on whether to do a link exchange based on the quality of the site. Maybe they could use Alexa to see if it gets traffic. They could also see how well the potential partner ranks on the keywords it targets. I think this would be a much better solution than showing pagerank. It makes the whole business more difficult and particular, as it should be.

[davesplace1]

Most link exchanges will bring very little traffic, but some can bring alot, then who cares about their PR. Everybody wants to trade with high PR sites because that gets you high up on the SERPs, and that will can bring a tidalwave of traffic.

[nohaber]

I am a big believer in link exchanges esp. for commercial sites.
I get traffic from link partners on my diet software site. When you sell a product, every visitor could bring money. If you have 1000 partners, and get 100 visitors a day, and make just one sale out of them, that could be worth a lot in the long run.
As for content sites, probably, link exchanges ain't that good for traffic, but can be still quite good for ranking.
I don't think toolbar PageRank is doing anything bad for the industry. If it ain't for PR, there would be a massive amount of link exchanges. Everyone would swap with everyone else for *ranking purposes*.
The SEO industry is to be blamed for the *links for ranking* state of affairs, not PR.

[James]

I don't like people saying that they won't exchange with a site below PR6. I don't mind above PR3 because that's easy for sites to achieve even with a link in their signature in forums.

[Haven]

Everything seems very complicated especially to those of us who are new to website design and promotion.



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