Search engines are not attaching any value of importance to link exchanges anymore. Having your link on the links page of another web site and returning the favour does nothing to increase the traffic to your site. Many people propagate that link exchanges still count, but being a webmaster, I can speak out of experience, they dont. On the contrary, link exchanges can get you banned from search engines if you build a large number of links in a very short period of time. Search engines normally warn against link farms and link exchange programs or any artificial way of building links. But is a useful links page totally useless? No, the name says useful links and if you place useful links that are related to the content of your site, you provide your visitors with value added information and with that you build a viral network of useful links. There is nothing wrong requesting a link back to your site, in fact a link buried between hundreds of other links is better than no link at all, but you should not rely on these links to bring you additional traffic.

People avoid the useful links pages because these pages are overcrowded and unorganised most of the times, so it is pages that carry little to no traffic at all. Web surfers want information on a silver tray, we live in the age of information overload and if you cant give visitors what they need, they will leave your site and forget about it. It has to be said that the more back-links you have, the better the chance of getting crawled by search engines and more links can lead to more frequent visits by the search engine spiders which in the end allows new content on your site to get indexed quicker. Besides the shorter waiting periods of getting new content indexed with search engines, there is no other benefit to link exchanges.

I mentioned articles in the title, so at this point you may be asking how they actually fit in with link exchanges? The principle stays the same, the main difference is that you not only exchange a single link, you exchange useful content with your link embedded into it. Search engines place a higher value on contextual links, links that actually means something to the reader of the content. Exchanging content also means that you will have a better chance of generating traffic from search engines than getting traffic to your links page. Your article is not only generating traffic for the site using it, but you are also exposing your link to valuable traffic. The important thing to remember here is to make sure your article is placed on a page that carries a high number of traffic. This can be achieved by checking the page rank of the page and more importantly, look at the content normally placed on the page. In return you can offer to place an article from the other site on one of your high traffic pages. If the articles carry content that is relevant to each other you can even place reciprocal links within each article. Now you have a way of putting those underused articles to good use on someone elses web site. In the process you are not only promoting your web site, you are also promoting your articles.

By now many SEO specialists are screaming: DUPLICATE CONTENT! If you are worried about duplicate content, simply write fresh articles and request that the other party do the same. Discuss a topic to write about, share ideas with each other. Have the other party write a review about a product on their site that will be of interest to your visitors and do the same with one of your products that will complement a product of the other site. You will end up building links, generating highly targeted traffic, promoting your articles, products and your web site, not only for yourself, but also for your article exchange partner.