Link exchange is popular in internet marketing, especially webmasters who seek to increase the page rank of the website. High page rank is important for a website because the chances of being crawled by search engines tend to be higher. The website with a good page rank thus receives more web visitors from search engines and other directories online.

Search engine like Google, yahoo and msn rate and rank the website by the link popularity. Link popularity is determined by the quantity and quality of relevant backlinks. Backlink is the incoming link to the websites. Many webmasters engaged in link exchange activities to increase the link popularity. Link farm, link exchange directory and link exchange management software are examples of the ways for link exchange. The purpose of link farm is to link to other sites with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity score. Some webmasters stuffing their website with as many links as possible. However, not all links are created equal. They have ignored the relevancy of the content for their neighboring webpages.

Google does not like link farm. They analyze page content of the website and also analyze the content of neighboring websites to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query. Once Google discover a website links to unrelated sites with irrelevant information, it labels the link they generate as spam and the site will be penalized.

Good linking strategies are useful to increase the page rank and link popularity score of a website. Webmasters should take into consideration these strategies when they practice link exchange. Webmasters can practice good linking strategies by maintain coherent theme, include the links in page content, have quality inbound and outbound links, and avoid automated link generators.

To increase the page rank by link exchange is not a good practice. The good content with SEO writing is necessary for a web page to appear on top of search engine.