Is a 'link Partner' Good Practice or Beneficial to Me at All?

[Fordy]

I run a small technology news website, and as you'd expect I receive a fair amount of spam - people trying to sell me things, review their cheap knockoff products, etc.

Among the bilge and the gems was an email from a webdesigner presumably responsible for several websites and their SEO, offering me a link exchange with a technology retailer.

Obviously not a massive retailer, I'll hint that the site was along the lines of AndroidTablets.com - ie it fulfills a niche, but doesn't serve a wide audience, and isn't Comet or anything like that. (I don't know if AndroidTablets.com exists or not, that's just an example for the name type).

I took a look at the site, and it seemed better than I thought, it's pretty decent actually.


So my question is really is: is linking to the retailer from my website, in return for a link from them, a bad idea and detrimental to my search rankings (which are - or at least have been - far better than I ever imagined) - or would it really benefit me?



Thanks in advance.

[varindia]

As par the new updates from Google(Panda3.3) "Link Partner"/ "link exchange" is a bad idea. If you consider your site to appears in some good position in SEs, then it is not advisable to keep large no. of partner links. You can keep with optimum no.