How to Score Link Exchange Partners for an Adult Site (Free Data Only)
Link exchanges are still the most common way adult sites get links: forum trade threads, directory owners who list you and ask for a link back, and webmasters who email you out of the blue. Most of these offers are small sites, and the paid SEO tools show “0” for nearly all of them. Here is how we rate every offer using only free data, and how we use the score.
The score decides placement, not yes or no
We trade with almost everyone who offers. A weak site’s link is worth little, but it rarely hurts, and small sites grow. What the score decides is where their link goes on our side:
- High score: a homepage or footer link, if they give us the same.
- Middle score: our partners page.
- Low score: our partners page, as long as they give us a real link in return.
This keeps the homepage for links that matter and still says yes to the rest.
Signal 1: Common Crawl authority
Common Crawl publishes a free web graph every quarter, with a rank for tens of millions of domains based on how the web links to them (harmonic centrality). It’s the closest free equivalent to the authority scores in paid tools, and it covers small adult sites those tools miss.
Calibrate it against your own sites before using it. Our own tubes sit between rank 16 million and outside the top 30 million, and most trade partners are around 20 to 28 million. A partner in the top 5 million is a strong link for us, even though it looks small in absolute terms.
Signal 2: age
The Wayback Machine’s first capture of a domain tells you roughly how long it has existed. A site online since 2011 that is still running has survived a lot of Google updates. A site registered last month might be gone next month, taking your link with it. Age alone is not quality, but it is a good tiebreaker.
Signal 3: is it a link farm?
Count the distinct external domains linked from their homepage. A tube that links to 15 partners is normal. A homepage with 300 outgoing links in the footer is a link farm, and a link from it is worth close to nothing. Also look at who they link to: if their neighbours are spam tools or warez sites, a link from them does you no good.
Signal 4: real referrals
Check your own server logs for visitors arriving from their domain. A partner that sends even a handful of real visitors a month is worth more than its authority score suggests. A partner that has “linked” to you for months and sent nobody may have hidden the link.
Verify, then keep verifying
The most common problem with exchanges is not bad partners but links that quietly disappear or change. We check every partner automatically:
- Their page loads and still contains a link to our domain.
- The link is dofollow. A link that silently changes to
nofolloworsponsoredis a lost trade. - The page is not
noindexand not blocked in their robots.txt.
When a check fails a few times in a row, we email the partner once. If the link doesn’t come back, their link on our side goes too. Most partners fix it within a day. Often it was a theme update that wiped their footer.
Practical rules for trading
- One link per partner per site. Ten links from the same owner’s ten sites to one page look unnatural.
- Keep partners pages to a sensible size. Ours list 10 to 35 partners each. A page with 500 links is a link farm.
- Put the other side’s link up first when they’ve already linked you. It builds trust and the trade completes faster.
- Use the real site name as the anchor. Exact-match keyword anchors on every partner link are a pattern search engines notice.
- Don’t buy links to fix this. Paid placements break search engine guidelines, and the sellers in adult forums mostly resell the same small sites at a markup.
Where offers come from
Forum trade threads, directory owners, and email to the contact address on every one of your sites. Read your spam folder too: we found several genuine trade offers there that had been sitting for days. Reply to every real offer, even with just “yes, which site?”. Most exchanges die because nobody answered.