Banner Exchanges good or bad?

Hi cmdown,

I would definitely stay away from link exchanges and even banner exchanges. They can do more bad than good.
If you think about it: when you visit a site and are exposed to banner ads everywhere, would you be grateful for the ads?

Besides that, Google is known to penalize sites for using link exchanges. You have to be really careful to what sites you link.

As far as Google is concerned: if a link exchange or link pool site links to yours then you are not responsible, but if your site links to a known link pool or link exchange, Google will hold you responsible for putting up the link and may remove your site from the index.

Bottom line: Google, and possibly other major search engines do not like link exchanges, so it would probably do more harm than do you any favours...

Hope this helps...

Here is what Google says about link-exchanges:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/webmasters/facts.html


When I was talking about "link-exchanges" I was basically referring to link-farms, link-pools or "free-for-all" exchanges. These are the ones to stay away from. A lot of them also harvest e-mail addresses.

But, there are also other link-exchanges which let you contact other sites directly regarding reciprocal links. These link-exchanges are probably ok. You just have to be careful, basically.

They are a waste of time, in my opinion.

You are wasting your time exchanging links.  If your site is important, people will point to you without you having to do them a favor of posting a link to them.  Check out "PageRank" by the Google boys.

PageRank explained:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html