Is Link Exchange Wrong/Dead ?

The answer to this question is a little bit absurd: it was never alive! Link exchange for the sole purpose of increasing search engine ranking is wrong to begin with. All the search engines want from you the webmasters is to create original and user-centric content and link to only relevant pages/sites. The links should be for your visitors, not for your "link partners".

So link to only relevant URLs and don't expect a link back. Someone will definitely link to you if you have a page worth being linked to.

I know you are upset with my "original approach", but that's the way it is. All SEO tricks are condemned to be discovered one day by the search engines and penalized. So it is up to you to decide if you want some traffic today the easy way and with a higher risk of getting pulled off the SERPs some day.

Google updates PR

Many web sites either suffered or benefited from the last Google PR update. Some very old and almost dead web sites started to appear in the results.

Yahoo refused Microsoft's offer

After a long and painful period of negotiation, Yahoo refused Microsoft's multibillion dollar offer. If this offer was accepted, there is no doubt that the search engine market will be dramatically changed. You may have to pay for each search for a typical hotel search in Yahoo.

Making Your HTML Valid

Creating a web page that conforms HTML/XHTML standards can be a factor in search engine optimization. You can use http://validator.w3.org/check address to check the validity of your pages. It provides hints for solving invalid HTML.

Exchanging Links: Is it Legitimate?

Links to a web page/site increases chance of display in search results for that page/site. If somebody links to your web site with or without your knowledge, that is a good thing. However, this takes very long, if you leave this process on its own. The solution for a quicker search engine boost is making link exchange with related web sites. You basically make searches for your target keywords and contact the webmasters of the sites in the results. Some of them will want to exchange links with you and this will benefit both sides. Actually if the relevancy between the sites are considered properly, search engines will like this, instead of marking it as spam.

Checking How Many Pages of Your Site are Indexed

You can check how many page are indexed from major search engines:

Yahoo: Hotel-Board.com
MSN Search: Hotel-Board.com
Google: Hotel-Board.com

Using Google Notebook

You can use Google Notebook for taking notes for the web pages in the search results as follows: Madrid Hotels . This was you can check your previous opinions for a web site.