SEO / exchanging links worth it?

[skypanther]

I should probably find an SEO forum for this, but perhaps someone here will know or be willing to provide an opinion anyway.

A client wants better search results placement. I told her that among other changes we should make, links to her site will help. She sent me a probably-spam message from www dot trainerprofiles dot com.

How can I tell if it's a link farm?
Does it matter?
Is it worth "exchanging links" with outfits like this?

Hers is a martial arts web site so I guess there's a fit between the sites.

Thanks,
Tim

 

[KCWebMonkey]

here's the buzz words you need to investigate:

reciprocal links - basically a link exchange - not usually worth it for SEO

one-way inbound links - link to your site where you don't provide a link back to their site - good for SEO if the referring site has a good PR (pagerank) and traffic

link-farm - stay away from these sites - you can tell if a site is a link farm by searching google for some of the content on that site. if you see multiple sites in the results with the same content then you have a link farm.

 

[skypanther]

Thanks. That's sort of what I figured. In this case, it would be a reciprocal link...and actually the other guy didn't even offer to put a link to my client's site just asked for one to his site. Smooooth.

She has two web sites, one I built and an older one from someone else. She's a bit upset that the old one gets better placement than the new one. But, she keeps putting off telling the other company to dump the site and update the domain name to point to her new one. And, there are ten times the links pointing to that old site as the new one (good one-way inbound links, too). Depending on the search text, the new one still comes out third or fourth on Google. Sheesh, what's she expect out of me?

Tim