Is Link Exchange or Directory Submission Dead?

Nowadays, there are a lot of so called Social Network Service (SNS) providers out there. Among them the most famous ones are Facebook and Twitter and other social media websites. All of them are characterized by being highly interactive and user-friendly.

This is good news for webmasters who are eagerly to get unique visitors to their websites. Previously, besides on-page optimization, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they accomplish this goal mainly by traditional link building methods including search engine submission, link exchange and directory submission. Now they have realized the effectiveness of those SNS websites in getting their websites exposed to a large group of potential visitors within a relatively short timeframe. Therefore, a lot of their promotion efforts are diverted to those SNS websites.

I don't want to say they are wrong. On the contrary, I'm always so amazed by webmasters' rapid and correct adaptation to any emerging technique in the field of internet marketing. Take Facebook as an example. Facebook takes the 2nd position in Alexa's Top 500 sites list, immediately after Google but before Yahoo. Some analysts even predict that in 2011 the traffic of Facebook will surpass Google. I'll be the stupidest webmaster in the world if I don't follow the trend to target adequate promotion efforts to Facebook like SNS sites.

However, spending adequate promotion efforts to SNS sites does not necessarily follow that we webmasters should neglect entirely the importance and effectiveness of link exchange and directory submission.(Here I didn't mention search engine submission, because with tons of free submission tool available here and there, search engine submission work is just a matter of mouse click and thus webmasters are still willing to do so.)

Google is still the number one. Generally speaking, you can expect that the major traffic of your website still comes from Google. Therefore, link exchange and directory submission still contribute to your promotion targeted at Google buzz, such as Page Rank (PR). Some people claim that Google has updated its PR algorithm so that the back links got from link exchange or directory submission are given less votes to your PR than before. I don't see that. Even if what they said is true, it's most likely because that Google has taken more factors into consideration when calculating each website's PR, so that the average vote resulted from each factor, such as back link, turns out to be less. Anyway, based on the current mainstream search engine technique represented by Google, it's unlikely that they can achieve a relatively fair search engine ranking result without giving serious consideration to back links. This fact won't change until a truly intelligent next generation search engine comes out.

On the other hand, although without question those SNS websites represented by Facebook are more effective in promotion than traditional web links or directories, they still have a long way to dominate the whole internet. Don't be over-enthusiastic in front of those fancy things in the internet. Do you still remember how people's over-enthusiasm resulted in the internet crisis around the year 2000? Do you still remember how video sharing websites burned venture capitalists' money like paper in the past few years? Stay calm my friends! We need to figure out what actual benefits the SNS websites will bring to us and take advantage of them in a thoughtful way. Apart from that, we should continue to invest out energy into traditional promotion efforts like link exchange and directory submission without being misled by exaggerated SNS buzzes.

In addition, SNS websites usually need your extra efforts before you start your actual promotion work. Put it in other words, you need to build your social network. The problem is, it takes you a huge amount of efforts to build such kind of social network. Clearly, you can't import your email or other contacts in real life into your social network directly, either because you don't want your real life friends or colleagues to know what you do in the internet or because seldom there are some people in your close life that have the same interest with you. Hence, you have to build this social network from scratch. The time it takes is at least comparable to, if not more than, that it takes you to exchanges links with other webmasters or submit your links to directories.

Arriving here, you probably got my point.SNS-targeted promotion is indeed more effective if you can manage to do it. However, however effective is SNS-targeted promotion, you can't afford to overlook the importance of link exchange or directory submission in any regard, since Google is still the internet king and since SNS is still at its fledging stage.