Is Most Link Building A Waste Of Time?

As I said in yesterday’s post I've started to investigate why only 13 of my own sites show as linking to my site in Google.

I've identified a list of sites that I will look at carefully, excluding any published / taken over by me since April. This becomes a massive task – I've got to look through the 13 sites that are shown by Google as linking, document which pages are linking and examine the link on those pages. Then I've got to look at the home pages of the other sites and see what elements are different. There are patterns forming – but not surprisingly every so often there’s a site that breaks the rules.

But the fact is that only 13 of about 100 are shown as linking to me and there has been no intention at all of breaking the link back. Therefore, if you are spending hours link building, what's the chance that Google is taking any note of those links? Out of the hundreds of link swaps I've agreed over time, hardly any appear on the google search. And I wouldn't be surprised if I have spotted at least a couple of reasons why.

If I'm right – and I'm going to try to prove this theory with a small experiment, then it could mean that most link swaps you have ever agreed are a waste of time.