With all the changes going on with the google algorithm I decided to find out if link exchanges still greatly impacted search engine rankings. As you can probably guess the main keyword we target for this blog is ‘web hosting blog’. When this site was just launched, it received a lot of attention (and a lot of links) which quickly propelled us to the top spots for our keywords. Since then, most of the attention has dwindled down and we now barely crack the top 30 for the same keywords.

In an experiment to try to validate the importance of link exchanges, I am going to try to get several other established sites (PR3 and above) to link us with the keyword ‘web hosting blog’. Although I’ll check back in with the results, everyone should be able to monitor the progress of this test by simply seeing how well we are moving up in the rankings for ‘web hosting blog’.

My gut feeling is that although most people have disreguarded link exchanges in recent months (since google started penalizing for the practice), it is still perhaps the best way to get better rankings from the search engines.