Which sites to link exchange with?

Here's a contentious issue - not how to find sites to swap links with, but who to swap links with. After all, it's only when you have decided who to swap links with that you can decide who you are looking for.

There are two schools of thought. One says that swapping with closely themed sites is all that you should do. This school is thinking that sort of link swap is more natural and will give you a better PR. The other school says the more the merrier and swap with anyone in sight.

I can't honestly say I prefer the former. Whilst it sounds better, I've never seen any direct benefit. Yes, if I could get Compare Mortgage Rates listed on the home page of other mortgage sites then I'd be delighted. But what sites are truly on topic?

Would you say that just mortgage sites are on topic, or that financial sites are on topic? Estate agents aren't really financial - they are home. But they are more closely related to mortgages than foreign exchange, which is financial.

In the real world, without link exchanges for PR, you would almost certainly find links to mortgage, insurance, solicitors, surveyors and removal firms websites on estate agents websites, and vice versa. That's because these businesses work hand in hand. Yet no category cleanly encompasses these variety of websites.

I've already spelled out in this series how contrasting niches of sites can naturally link to each other, so why then artificially create boundaries? Search engines, however clever, can't put each website into a niche that it should be linking to, so we're not mimicking what they expect.

So I say, within reason, any website is open to a link exchange. Don't look at whether they are the same niche, look at whether they get traffic and if we are being good, if our visitors are likely to find them useful. I get many visitors to my sites arriving through the links directory, so why not make sure these directories do some good?