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Link ExchangingI am a big fan of Nero Wolfe, the eccentric fictional detective created by Rex Stout. I'm such a fan that I decided to create a Web site. Hey, that's what all of us fans do - create fan sites. This one is a little different, though. It looks like the official site of the Nero Wolfe detective office. Since the title of the page, meta tags and text mention "private detective", you may find the page if you're hunting for Sam Spade types in New York City. I know people are finding the page because last week I received an email from someone who was interested in working for Nero Wolfe, and another from a private investigator's marketing person who wanted to add Nero Wolfe to their link exchange list of private detectives. For a few moments, I felt mischievous. I thought it would be hilarious to agree to the link exchange, and have the uninformed marketing person put "Nero Wolfe" on their list of private detectives. At some future point in time, a friend or customer would snidely point out the situation to the owner, who would never live it down. He would then, of course, fire the poor woman who had set this up. Being inherently a nice guy, I simply sent an email saying that I really didn't think they'd be interested. She responded, pretty quickly, that yes they WOULD still want to trade links; they'd just put me on a generic list as opposed to the professional page. This agency is SERIOUS about link exchanging as a way of improving their search engine rankings. But I'm not sure it's working. A visit to ixquick.com with a search of "private investigators" didn't list their firm. And they were devoting some serious time and energy to building their link exchange network. So before you try this approach, consider how much time it's going to take. Many of the search engines use the number of links to your site as a gauge for its value, but there is a LOT of work in getting other sites to link back to you. You've got to identify sites, write emails, respond to emails, update your page, and follow up on whether or not you're listed on the other sites. This seems like way too much work. And there's no guarantee that a link you spent a lot of time and energy acquiring is going to be picked up by the search engines. I'm guessing that it might be cheaper to simply buy your way into search engine results using goto.com and other pay-for-placement search engines. By the way, here is the Nero Wolfe page And no, he's not taking on any new cases.
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