Is Link Exchange Good or Bad for SEO in 2025?

Last Updated on 22/01/2025

What is Link Exchange?

Technically, Link exchange is an alliance of websites that work like a web ring. The website owners register their sites with a central organization that runs the exchange and, in turn, get HTML code from the exchange, which they insert into their web pages.

In a web ring, the HTML code consists of circular ring navigation, while in a link exchange, the HTML code results in a display of banner advertisements for the websites of other exchange members.

In simple terms, link exchange is a deal between two or more websites to give links or trade them. Brands do link exchanges to quickly create links and boost their authority, improve rankings, etc.

People name them reciprocal links, link exchanges, and link swaps. Brands do these exchanges to generate links quickly and boost their authority, improve rankings and so on. 

Is Link Exchange Good or Bad for SEO?

Link exchange has advantages and disadvantages for those using the web for marketing. They can be advantageous by bringing a highly targeted readership and increasing a website’s ‘ link popularity ‘, a stable hyperlinking method. They can be disadvantageous as they can distract visitors to other sites before they have entirely explored the site. Link exchanges or paid linking activity is discouraged by Google.

It is highly prohibited for website owners who seek to increase search engine rankings. As per Google, excessive link exchanges and ‘ Link Schemes ‘ can suppress the linked site in SERPs or block it altogether.

As per John Mueller,

‘’A Link Exchange which involves ‘Link to me and I’ll link to you is against our webmaster guidelines and our algorithms would look at that and try to understand what is happening here and try to ignore those links and the web spam team will also find it not okay. If the majority of the links to your website are built via link exchanges, then they will apply manual action to it, so this is something that you should avoid.’’

If web admins want to avoid getting banned by Google.

It is a good practice to avoid spammy link schemes as they are a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Steps You Can Follow To Get Backlinks Instead of Link Exchanges:

There are many better methods that you can follow for getting backlinks instead of focusing on unethical methods like link exchanges. As per Google’s quality guidelines, asking for links from other sites is not a good way. Instead, you should create unique content that will automatically turn website owners to link back to it as mentioned in the quality guidelines below :

We will highlight some steps we follow for the content promotion outreach campaign instead of directly asking for links from other brands.

Look for link prospects:

Link Prospecting is finding pages on which you want to get a link.

You can search for new links in hundreds of places, like Google search results, your competitor’s backlinks, or your competitor’s link targets.

Firstly, we will find link prospects who find our content relevant and meaningful.

For example, we want to promote our blog, Digital Marketing Guide For Beginners: Simple & Extensive, as it’s one of the best resources.

We can promote it once we have strong content by following our outreach process. So, we will find bloggers who have written Digital Marketing content and need related studies. We will find many opportunities to maximize our chances of getting the different types of links we want for our content.

Formulate your outreach email:

After finding the link prospects, the next step is formulating an outreach email.

Here is the email outreach screenshot:

The first part of the cold outreach email is essential as you can review the critical elements like the subject line, opening line, and sign-off at this stage.

Find contact details of your prospects:

We use a tool called ‘FindThatLead’ to find any web domain’s email addresses or LinkedIn profile. You can easily research for a lead, verify their email address and send them a direct message. In the screenshot below, we are searching for the email address of Marketing Lad. We are getting their verified email address using the Find That Lead tool.

Final Steps:

Our final step is personalizing the outreach email per the individual prospect. Personalizing your emails may include adding the prospect’s first name, address, company name, etc. It will indicate that you’ve done your research and when our outreach campaign is successful. We make sure to record all the minute details in Google Sheets, as shown in the screenshot below:

This brings us to the end of a successful content promotion campaign!

Conclusion

Link exchanges can suppress your site in the SERPs if done excessively. It is better to adopt white-hat and ethical link-building approaches for building backlinks and thus increasing traffic to your website.

We have also given an overview of our outreach process. You can follow them to get backlinks instead of getting involved in link exchanges.

Is It Okay To Do a Link Swap/Exchange?

Generally speaking, there is no good or bad in link exchanges.

In a link-building industry, we have seen big brands do link exchanges and brands that use other strategies for building links. Remember that you can make great authority and traffic to your site if done right. 

We, as an agency, keep this tactic under grey-hat SEO. Some agencies use this tactic, and honestly, they have never been penalized by Search Engines. We say this because of our experience working with agencies.

We are not promoting link exchange tactics because, on the other hand, Google is not happy with link exchanges. Google prefers a natural and earned link. Do you think we have not seen a single site that was penalized?

How about there is always the first time, and if you do it, you get a penalty?

Since Google is a machine, you can benefit from that and do exchanges until you are not doing it publicly, and reciprocal links are widespread.

When Should You Do Exchanges?

You can do link exchanges if you have multiple sites. That way, it could be tricky for search engines to figure out the exchanges. You can do exchanges to some extent; overdoing is always wrong and could lead to penalties. Always go with relevancy and not just with sites completely outside your niche.