Depending on who you listen to in the SEO world, reciprocal link exchanges may now be dead, at least for Google. True? Maybe, maybe not, but I’ll still exchange links with quality relevant sites.

Just today, however, I’ve heard of two services starting to help with content exchanges, something I’ve tried in the past, but it’s very hard to do on your own.

A content exchange means that you have another site post an article of yours, including appropriate link(s) to your site, and you post one of their articles on your site. It’s a great way to keep links very relevant.

One of the services is very new. It’s called Content Relay. Yes, you can do traditional link exchanges there too, but the focus is to be on content exchanges. The other service you may be familiar with. It’s Link Metro. They’re the link exchange service started by Brad Callen, who created SEO Elite, quite possibly the best SEO software currently available. However, you can now also do content exchanges through Link Metro.

Now, the same rules apply for content exchanges as for link exchanges. You want your link partners to be of high quality. I won’t post just any pointless, rambling, yet keyword optimized article on my site. It needs to be appealling to my visitors. I also won’t post quality content unless I feel there is some merit to the site I am linking to through it. I’m in business to please my visitors, and while that means some things must be done to please the search engines, their needs come after those of my visitors. Call it a personal preference if you will.

Will content exchanges work as well as link exchanges? It’s hard to say. They bring a new level of challenge to monitoring your link partners, certainly, another reason to decide on quality rather than quantity. It’s not too hard to monitor traditional link exchanges with the right link directory installed on your site, but monitoring whether or not your content is still posted will be more challenging. Still, so long as what you’re putting on your site is of good quality, you’re likely to get some benefit from it, even if your partner drops your content. There’s always AdSense!