Question about link exchanges for SEO.

In order to increase the ranking of my client's website, I've been checking the backward links of the their top competitors to find out which sites are linking to these competitors.

On any given competitor that ranks withing the top 10 on google or yahoo, it seems they are doing so called link exchanges with other sites. Now obviously, I'm assuming these other sites won't provide a link to your site unless you provide a link on your site to theirs.

Now here's the interesting part. These top competitors of my client are all doing link exchanges however they seem to either be hiding their link exchanges very well so customers can't find these links to other sites or they simply don't provide a link to these other sites at all.

For example, one competitor links to a site called What Cruises. If you go to www.whatcruises.com/addurl/, you'll notice they clearly state they want their banner link placed on your site before they link to yours however if you check out one of the companies who is doing this link exchange with them, magazines.com, you won't find that banner link for What Cruises anywhere.

So my question is, how are my clients' competitors adding their url to these sites without having to do the same on their site?

Thanks in advance.

-Goalie35

Chances are they only put up the "reciprocal" link for a couple of days, until they notice the backlink was added on the partner site. Some partners even don't bother to check. Fact is that some webmasters are very conscientious about link exchanges, and some are not. And of course - by removing the links to unrelated partner sites, they keep their own site's theme focused. Furthermore they can channel their pages' Page Rank back to their own pages, instead of towards all these other sites... Obviously the method pays.

Trade backlinks with the sites that your competitors "trade" or receive backlinks from. After a period of time contact the link partner and ask them about the sites that don't seem to be linking back. Give it time though.

Who knows, maybe they are directly paying for the links or providing some other service for the link.

Dave

Is it possible that they might have two sites(or more)?

One with a more broad range of themes...
They offer to put a link on that site, if a returned link is offered to their Main Site?

why don't you try to exchange links with them to see how they handle it?

you may find that they put your link on an un-spidered page that is disallowed in robots.txt. that way, they gain a link, and show you your link, but you are the only one who sees it.

this would be shady though and i don't think many would appreciate this angle.

-Scott

It is possible that they are doing this with CSS2 and hiding the banner link under the rest of the site of just making the visibility property hide it all together.

This will still show as a valid link for search engines and link checking software. It is a bit sneaky though!
Reciprocal links are becoming less and less important all the time. Personaly I feel it is a better bet building up good relevant one way links - they are far more beneficial than reciprocals!

[QUOTE=tstolber]
Reciprocal links are becoming less and less important all the time.QUOTE]

Where did you get this info from? I would say reciprocal links with irrelevant content might be the case but not relevant.

Forgot to say hello to all so here ya go:

Hello all.

Cheers

Pablo

Hi Pablo

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Links from a site to your site that is not relevant does not have much effect.
It does have an effect I do agree - it is just not very much thats all.

the best type of link to get is a non-reciprocal relevant link then a reciprocal relevant link, then a non-reciprocal unrelated link, then a reciprocal related link.

I would not bother getting links from sites that are not related. Many people try and hide reciprocal links anyway.

I have found this to be true over time, and it is becoming more of an issue now.