I recently read about LinkAlizer at BlogCityTales and it seemed like a good way of finding new websites to exchange links with. Therefore, I thought I would sign up and see how things went.
If you have a high number of relevant, quality websites linking to yours it will boost your search engine popularity. As Community Spark is a new blog, I am eager to increase its exposure as much as possible.
As soon as I signed up, I started receiving emails telling me my link exchange application had been accepted. Reading further into the email, I was told that a site had accepted my link exchange request. This was news to me, as I had only just signed up and each email I received was in relation to a site I would not want to link to for various reasons.
It turns out that LinkAlizer offers a ‘Premium Membership’. If you upgrade to a premium membership, you automatically receive a link exchange request from all new LinkAlizer members. Perhaps this is good for the premium members, but it is not something I was aware would happen.
Over the course of three days, I received 44 of these emails. Every single one was from a site that I would not be interested in linking with. The majority of websites were simply affiliate landing pages or referral pages for online medication.
During my time as a signed up member, I received a few link exchange requests from members that had found my website in the LinkAlizer database and had decided they wanted to exchange links. Unfortunately these sites were also completely irrelevant to mine and many were in the same categories as mentioned above.
Overall I would not recommend LinkAlizer. As is often the case when looking to submit your website to directories and build up your link exchanges, it pays to do it manually. It may take longer but at least you can be confident you are doing everything correctly and in the best way possible.
LinkAlizer certainly can offer you a large number of sites to exchange links with, but I did not come across one ‘quality website’ with decent and relevant content. If you don’t care where your link exchanges come from, by all means give LinkAlizer a try. However, for those that want to exchange links only with quality, relevant sites you shouldn’t waste your time (or strain your mailbox) with LinkAlizer – unless you are flogging cheap meds or have developed a turnkey ‘made for Adsense’ website.
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Great this is the kind of information webmasters are looking for…great work !!
Glad you enjoyed the review – there are more in the pipeline so stay tuned!
I have not tried LinkAlizer but I have tried several other link exchange programs. They have got me zero links. All the sites that I have found that I would want to exchange with never respond and the link requests that I get are from sites that have nothing to do with me.
Of course I haven’t had much luck getting regular link exchanges either.
Michael – I really wouldn’t recommend LinkAlizer; the sites in their network are overwhelmingly of extremely poor quality and even now I get the odd emails off them even though I am no longer a member.
The best way to build links is to do it manually. You may like to check out my article series on link building.
Martin, Thanks for your unbiased review of Linkalizer.com. I have a quick question for you. I am in the process of launching a site called Linklizer without the A. Do you think LinkAlizer.com reputation will hurt or negatively impact my new site.
My site is a bidding directory quite contrary to likalizer which is a link exchange.
Thanks in advance.
Sarah – I would always steer away from having a domain name that is too similar to another. Asides from any copyright or ‘passing off’ issues you may come across, you don’t want people to get your domain wrong and end up at the wrong site.
I would recommend going for something completely original wherever possible.
great review, i had the exact same problem with linkalizer, since i dropped all the reciprocal links from this service from my site google has been friendlier to me, went straight to pr 1 a week after removing said links, had been pr0 for a month since launch, articles are the way to go in my book, great job again
Adam – Linkalizer is not a method I would recommend to promote your site. Far better to concentrate on publishing quality content, as it appears you are now doing. Good luck!
I found this post through searching the terms “linkalizer” and “warning”
It looks like warning people against linkalizer did you better than subscribing to it!
Nick – At least something good came from my awful experience of LinkAlizer, then!