What is a good forum or resource to contact fellow SEO professionals for SEO partnership opportunities i.e. link trades?

[RyanMeighan]

While Moz is an excellent resource, i get the impression that it is for community-based SEO questions that can serve as a knowledge database. I am looking for a forum or resource where I can contact other SEO workers to explore link exchange opportunities. For example, i want to reach out to those who do SEO for audio/visual, technology, and event-planning companies so i can offer them links in exchange for some recommended links to my site. Before anyone dogs on link trading as being spammy and not best practice, it would only be done in a useful, relevant, and non-spammy fashion with other high authority sites.

Thanks!

Ryan

[R0bin_L0rd]

Eugh, sounds frustrating and I understand your reaction, good luck with the grind!

[RyanMeighan]

Thanks Robin. I would tend to agree with your points. I began with your traditional approach with reaching out one by one to great sites. I got approved for a guest post to EventBrite with a DA of 93. It was written, approved, and everything and then they blew me off. So I just felt defeated and got lazy. Back to the grind I guess.

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi Ryan, at risk of giving the answer you said you didn't want - If you're looking for link trades I would consider approaching this from the opposite direction. To avoid being completely unhelpful I'll take as given that, as you say, the activity would be useful to users, not spammy, and only with high-authority sites.

On a forum like the one you describe, the vast majority of people looking for link exchanges won't have that same criteria as you. They are more likely to be spammy, particularly if they are openly looking for these kind of link exchanges, one or two isn't going to make a night-and-day difference so they'll be trying to collect as many as possible and will quite likely be putting all the links on their site just on a directory page. So if you find one of these forums, you have the task of sifting through a group of people who are probably much more focused on spam, finding the ones in your industry, then checking their sites to make sure they are on the level.

Given that you already have an industry in mind, it would probably make sense to cut out that first step of going to a link exchange forum, which would probably just muddy the water anyway and start by looking at the sites you'd like to be featured on. Then from there you could look at what aspect of your offering or content they might like to link to, or whether there is some kind of partnership you could do together. The nice benefit of this is it's not just increasing links to your site, it's also helping grow your brand awareness and network which is much more valuable than just a link exchange.

Hope that helps!