WordPress Link Exchange Plugin and Tools

Blogrolling is either dead, or dying fast. Most bloggers hardly link to another blog in their blogroll without asking for a link in return (or expecting you’ll return the favor). I can understand why – the same space can be sold to the highest bidder!

Blogs have limited online real estate, and if you link to all your favorite bloggers without getting anything in return, that’s not all too fair isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to link to other bloggers who would return the favor, getting you valuable backlinks and improving your SEO score?

For some of my niche blogs, I’ve been looking for a way to create some 2-way / 3-way links exchanges with related blogs. I’ve searched high and low for a solution, and ended up using the LinkEx software along with a WordPress widget that was developed specifically for it. The ironic part is that I finally found the solution by going through massive amounts of Google results and ending up at a adult webmaster forum.

Using LinkEx to Manage Your Link Exchange

Although there are tons of link exchange software all called “LinkEx” or some variation of the name, the one I am referring to is at www.Linkex.dk – which should be the original website for the software. It’s free to use, no catch. Just download the entire thing and upload it to your web server. It contains just one php file and requires no MySQL database, so all the better!

The initial set-up page is very simple too, all you need to do is select your admin username, password, email, web URL and website title. Make sure you set the file permissions to “766” or “755” depending on your type of blog hosting="http://gobala.linktrackr.com/hostgator-bs:keywords">hosting.

Next what you want to do is click on “Categories” and change the name of the default to whatever you want. By doing this you can specify the limit of links, or break up links into different categories and display them on different parts of your blog.

Then you need to edit the way links are displayed. If you want link to be displayed in your current BlogRoll / sidebar area, you need to make sure they are “list items”, which means you have to add the <li> tags before and after like this:

If you want to display only links and not descriptions, you can edit be removing the {$DESCRIPTION} part of the code.

Activate 2-Way / 3-Way Link Exchange?

The good part about using LinkEx is that you can do more than just a simple link exchange. Since you can specify alternate backlinks you can literally have a 3-way / X-way link exchange and also do some deep linking.

Click on “Settings” and edit your link requirements. Make sure you know which keywords to use or you’re just wasting time.

I highly recommend that you use more than one url. The easy way is to specify your category / tag URLs as alternates.

Keep Your Link Exchange Tightly Controlled

From my experience, if you fail to set strict rules people will always manipulate the system. So go to “Settings” and click on “Link Verification Settings”. Make your rules:

I highlighted the changes I usually make to ensure my links do not end up on some spammy sites or link farms, but you should edit it based on your own preferences.

It’s important to set character limits for links to keep links looking short and real. When setting “Max Outbound Links” take into consideration that most blogs would have at least 20 outbound links on the main page. If you set this too low almost every other blog would be disqualified.

You can set the maximum amount of links you want to accept, and when that limit is reached your submission form will be automatically closed.

Displaying The Links On Your WordPress Blog

If you click on “Categories” and “edit”, at the bottom of the page you should see the exact PHP code you need to include into your template / theme files:

If you generated multiple categories, you can put different codes into different parts of your theme.

However, if you want to display links on your sidebar using WordPress widgets, you need to download and use the LinkEx Widget. This is specifically built for the LinkEx software. Just download it here and upload / activate it. Then in your Widgets area you can control this easily and the default setting should work unless you installed LinkEx in another folder.

One thing I didn’t quite like is that fact that the widget inserts a backlink automatically to their site. This is ok with me, except that the site is some dodgy-looking porn / skimpy girls website. So I’m sorry I had to remove it but I replaced it with a link back to the plugins page to be fair.

(How did that porn link get through WordPress admin anyway?)

I highly recommend you do this too unless you want to tarnish your image. If you don’t know how to do it you can simple download the modified version here (at the end of this post).

Now any links that you process with the LinkEx software should automatically appear in your sidebar widget.

Should You Start a Link Exchange Project?

I know not many people are keen on the idea of exchanging links right now, but before you shout “Google will ban you” to me, let me explain. Link exchange is good if you:

1. Only exchange links with quality sites – PR or PageRank can be a good indicator but really you need to look at the whole blog
2. Do not link up all your sites together (please)
3. Do not depend 100% on link exchange – explore other ways of getting 1-way links or 3-way links and maybe even article marketing
4. Don’t stuff your link title with keywords – make it short and more natural
5. Allow some non-reciprocal links – Put in some no-reciprocal links to other sites as well just like a normal blogroll

On Profit Blogger and my Work at Home blog, I use it only to hook up with “partner” sites that I have personally identified and that have a good overall ranking in Google.

This is the best solution I can come up with and it seems to work, so enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Wordpress Plugin – Amazon Context Link Ads
2. Lucia's Link Love Plugin
3. 5 Free Wordpress Theme Design Tools
4. The Right And Wrong Ways to Link
5. Plugin: Display Feed Link at Bottom of Posts