link exchange

I know you can have bad links or links from not so highly ranked sites. Is it possable to have to many links pointing at your own site?

Also how long does it take to get listed and recognized by all of the search engines if you dont pay services?

 Are there still free services to register with all search engines good and bad. If you are registered at a search engine with corrupt traffic does this hurt your site at all in Googles eyes?

These are all excellent questions. I think you are really asking about link exchange services so I will try to answer with that it mind.

• I would not neccessarily say that there is such thing as too many links, but the quality of those links pointing to your site (not just your home page mind you, but all your pages) is and will most likely always be more important than the quantity. In short, the best links you can get are those which are permanent and from those sites which are well respected and well-indexed in the search engines.
  
  
• It could take several months for search engines to factor in all the links pointing to an individual site. The reason is that search engine spiders index some sites more frequently than they do others. If you want to have links pointing in quickly, obtain links from sites you know to provide new content frequently as they are most likely crawled more - the result of which is that your links will be add up faster.
  
  
• There are still services available which claim to get you indexed by the search engines, but there is really no need to submit sites to the major search engines any more because they are sophisticated to the degree that if you have people linking to you, they will eventually index your site. Both Yahoo and Google provide webmasters with a way to make sure all of their content can be indexed - Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer

I would not rely on too much on link building services. The only real way to gain quality inbound links is to earn them. You may want to read my commentary from the August 2006 issue of Website Magazine - "Link Outside the Box".

Now are link exchanges worthless with the advent of google saying no recipical links??