Link Exchanges Effective for SEO in 2013?

Preface: Back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, link exchanges were one of the most popular ways to build links to your site. Everyone was doing it and nearly every website had a dedicated page strictly for reciprocal links. It was not only easy to do, but the success rate was pretty high because it was mutually beneficial for both parties.
Today, link exchanges are not nearly as effective as they once used to be. Search engines have become smarter and shady linking schemes have become detectable. By participating in link exchange schemes, you bear the risk of getting penalized or even banned by the search engines.
How Does Google Feel about Link Exchanges?
According to Google, they oppose “Excessive link exchanging.” (Source) The keyword there is “excessive.” Don’t over do it!
What Does Matt Cutts Say about Link Exchanges?

Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it’s natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you’re worried, you can use nofollow. 

My Experience with Link Exchanges
Back in the days, I did a whole lot of link exchanges and they did wonders for my search engine rankings. Today however, I don’t even think about it. It’s not that I don’t think it works. It’s more that other people are not doing it. Plus nowadays, most people don’t even respond to link exchange proposals anymore. They just delete the email or mark it as spam.
Here are some things to think about when doing link exchanges:

• Don’t exchange links with non-relevant websites.
• Be selective with who you exchange links with.
• Ask yourself – “is this a resource that I would want to share with my visitors?”
• Link exchanges should not be your only method of building links.

Conclusion
I believe link exchanges are still effective if done right and conservatively. If you focus on quality and relevancy, you should not have any issues. Remember to diversify your backlink profile and do it naturally.

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What is directory listing?

What is directory listing?

There are those embarassing moments in life when you feel naked when someone sees at you something they aren’t suppose to see. The same happens with a site, when someone gets to a directory where there is no “index.php” or “index.html”. When those files are missing, the site shows the visitor the directory listing with all the files that are inside it.
For example, if we type “www.somesite.com/images” in the browser, if the settings are not right, the browser will show the listing of the files that can be found in that directory. For security reasons, it’s better not to show the files inside the directory of the web server.
Most of the web servers are configured in such a way that they don’t show the listing of the directory. And yet, there are web servers that are not configured that way.

How can I prevent directory listing?

There is a simple way to prevent directory listing. Just put the any one of following code (after which make sure you press an Enter, the file must end with an empty line) into the .htaccess file.

Options -Indexes

or

IndexIgnore *

If you place the .htaccess file in the root folder you will prevent the directory listing aswell the directory listings of the sub-folders.

What if I want to prevent the listing of certain extensions?

Let’s suppose that you don’t want to list “.jpg , .gif and .zip” and you don’t care about listing other files of that directory then you can out the following code inside .htaccess.
You will have to write:

IndexIgnore *.gif *.jpg *.zip

If your server is setup with preventing directory listing then you can add the following code in the .htaccess file to allow the directory listing.

Options +Indexes 

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