Just about everybody in the Internet marketing field know that backlink building really can make or break their online business. And a few years ago, trading links together with various other websites was looked upon as being a great way to build backlinks. But with all the modifications that Google has made over time, is this still thought to be a good marketing method? If you want to know if it is still an effective practice, keep reading and you will find out the answer.

So basically a backlink is a link that points from one site to another site. These backlinks are usually viewed as votes for your site by the major search engines. Which means that your Internet site will rank higher in the search engines when you have more inbound links to your website. When it relates to the value of each backlink you'll find that some backlinks have better value than others. Let's just say you have a link on a Internet site that has a page rank of 3, if the link is on the home page of the site you will find that it has more value than if the backlink is found on a sub page of that website. In order to determine the value of the link you'll want to look at the page the link is on, instead of what the page rank of the home page is, even though the home page rank will probably still help a little.

When men and women trade links with other sites normally those other websites have a separate page on their site where they place the link for your site. So you're not getting the same results from that backlink, that you would from the home page of that site. Another thing you should remember about these link web pages is that your link may be surrounded by hundreds of other links. I am sure nearly all of you already know that Google frowns upon this and generally these backlinks don't even get counted.

Something else you may or may not have heard is that Google does not give the same authority to links that are exchanged as they do to one way links. For those of you who are unaware a one way link is actually when you don't have to link back to the Internet site that has your link on it. When Google views one way links they provide that link more strength than a link that has been exchanged. You could also find websites that Google has de-indexed and if you end up trading links with them it is possible to hurt your own rankings. Of course it is not your aim to have Google hate you, however it can happen if you trade backlinks with the wrong websites.

The only time trading inbound links can provide advantages for you is when the web page where your link is has a very good page rank and a great deal of visitors. If your link ends up getting hidden on some deeper page of the site there is a great chance that the page where your link is, is not even indexed by Google. The problem is that most Internet sites that trade backlinks actually have some sort of links page that doesn't get indexed. To sum up, when you are able your better off building one way links and there are lots of ways to accomplish this, but swapping links is a thing that is going by the wayside.