Is getting links from websites similar to yours still an effective tool

Ask Me Anything Q&A SEO Office Hours Repo

Topic summary

A user who practiced SEO from 1997 but has been away from the field is asking whether old-school link exchange strategies remain effective in 2025.

Historical Context:

  • In the late 1990s, businesses commonly traded links via “Resource Pages” linking to similar websites (e.g., probiotics sellers linking to vitamin or soap retailers)
  • The process involved finding relevant sites, negotiating exchanges, and monitoring link placement
  • Some used three-way link schemes to obscure the reciprocal nature from search engines
  • These tactics were effective at the time

Current Question:
The user seeks to understand if similar link-building techniques still work today and what modern methods exist for acquiring relevant backlinks.

Status: The question remains unanswered with no responses yet.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I started doing SEO in 1997 but have been out of that field for years. Back in the early days of people putting up commercial websites on the internet some of us businesses “traded links.” The way it worked was we each had a “Resource Page” that had links to websites similar to ours. Since I sell probiotics, my resource page included businesses that sold dietary supplements similar to mine. Maybe vitamins or handmade soap.

The process of creating the Resource Page was tedious. First you had to find a similar website, then email them asking to trade links, then track and make sure your link went up and stayed up on their website if they agreed to trade. Some people even went so far as to do a 3-way link so it was not obvious to the search engines they were trading links. Like one might point to website-A, website-A would point to website-B and website-B would point back to the one.

In those early days the links made a difference. Would something like this technique work today in 2025? What are some ways of getting relevant links used today?