Re: Does anyone know?

Hi Jean

My opinion: get out of the link exchanges altogether. :-) Links are
good, lots of links are nice, but really off-topic links with bad /
missing anchor texts really don't do much for your placement and
certainly won't get you any new visitors! And I bet you probably have
better things to do :-)

Just my opinion :-))

If you have "control" over two sites, play with them a bit and test
some linking strategies, especially regarding traffic / visitors going
from one site to the other. I think you'll see that traffic that comes
from "link" pages is about ZERO (you can and SHOULD track this on your
existing site already). Links from somewhere within the text, or below
any "action-items" (eg "now that we've finished with that, ....." )
really get people interested and they do take a look.

You know, I'm a natural guy (no, not THAT way, lol), I like natural
links. Those are the types of links I can be pretty sure of that
neither Google nor any other search engine is likely to "invalidate".
Those are they types of links that stick and those are the links that
send me visitors - after all, I'm looking for visitors, not numbers in
any search engine, and I want those visitors interested in what I have
to offer, not just click-throughs that accidentally clicked the wrong
link...

Ooops, sorry, I'm ranting off again :-)

John

PS Jean, since you're so obsessed about this link stuff, I would
recommend you take a look at seoelite.com - Brad has a series where you
can sign up for a new mail for 7 days that help you get your site
rolling, including with links, etc. The software is a bit expensive and
I'm sure there are similar (copied) things available (
http://tools.seobook.com/ comes to mind), but his texts are really good
and on-target. No, I don't get anything out of recomendations :-)).
Other people say similar things, but he tends to get to the point and
help you nail things down... Try the free mails and don't do anything
drastic to your site before asking others (like at
http://cre8asiteforums.com/ )! Any have a great holiday!