This practically means that you loose thousands of backlinks if you deny link exchanges.
There are certain guidelines to follow when doing link exchanges however they are great link building method. They are highly effective as well, you cannot say link exchanges are no longer that effective. They still are as much as they were. That was going to become some new theory as well. By effective one understand they are very easy to get and search engines consider them powerful.
What is dead for sure are blog comment posting probably, since almost all blogs are now using nofollow tags. The two most effective methods to get links are article submission and link exchanges. Obviously article exchanges are much better than link exchanges, but they are not effective, since it is too difficult to make at least one article exchange. So you cannot say they are more effective or more powerful. The reality is they are not.
Make link exchanges with only related or relevant sites myth.
This is big one, because even some popuplar people mention it, so webmasters believe into it more quickly. However luckily not everyone believes this theory. Again, results show that you can get links from any website. The more links you have the better.
It can be good idea to create a highly focused link directory first, but then you can expand. However if you are very familiar with link exchanges, and you can get many of them very quickly, you can get from any theme instantly.
Make link exchanges with websites that have a specific pagerank myth.
It means one thing, you loose a ton of links, denying certain websites. It does not matter if the site has pagerank zero or ten, it is still an important link to get. This will only affect your rankings in a positive way by exchanging links with all websites.
Ok, some have pagerank zero and you did all that work and have a pagerank of four. So what? Do you no longer want backlinks because you have a higher pagerank? Everyone needs backlinks, no matter your pagerank.
Article submission myth.
There are many things wrong, including the duplicate content theory. It strictly does not exist, webmasters simple understand it wrong. Submitting the same article to all article directories and everywhere is a great thing, you get all those one way links.
Spinning titles, descriptions and so forth is not required. No article, webpage or website will get banned by doing this.
However if you grab an article from some directory to put it on your website, it is a good thing to do if you link to the source. Not only because you should give credit to the author, but spiders appreciate it.
What you need to make unique is meta tags. I am not saying you can have exactly similar webpages on your website. That is not a good thing to do, obviously.
Making sure you do not fall victim to invented theories or incorrect ones is important. A new theory is created out of nowhere every now and then. This is happening all the time and these spread like a virus. People seems to love talking about what works and what does not.
However what is important is to stick with what works and avoid believing into new things as if they are some strict rules.
