disappointing about linkspun
 

Disappointed about Linkspun
I got a linkspun account since 1 year now, i have not seen so much benefits for several reasons.

*First of all many domains on linkspun have low quality content. They are many website with many pages and no interesting content in it or duplicate contents.
*Many websites in German with no interest in exchanging links with english speaking websites.
*Many pages pageranks are low and never get higher. It means many pages who link to you stuck to PageRank ZERO
*In webmaster tools, links from linkspun generated sitewide links. one generated 15000 links, i wonder if it is not harmful for my website.
*your website ends up with many external links. Since you have many inbounds and outbound links you expose your website to google penalties.

Conclusion, i wonder if linkspun is not counter-productive.

what do you think?

Not sure, I started trading and brought a blog up from 0 to 1. So it's working for me so far. I've only done 3 trades on that site too.

Pr is useless

It worked for me too, got my site to pr2 (and significant rise in alexa and seomoz rank) in two months. But I wonder about those sitewide links too.

In fact, i had also PR improvement but then my traffic went done. I wondered if i was penalized by Google.
So, then, i looked into the trades i was involved in. I found there were lots of guys doing keywords stuffing. It means your link appears among 50 links in a text.
This is considered as keywords stuffing.

Please let me give you some examples of what i call linkspun bad trades.

1. Many outgoing links:
The following page has 348 outgoing links. It means you receive a non significant portion of google juice. If you got let's say 10 links on your page and even if the PR is the same as your partner page pagerank, you send much more google juice as compared to the partner page.
wwwDOThusbandwatchingwifeDOTcom

2. keywords stuffing:
At the bottom of the following page, you will see many outgoing links in the footer as a paragraph text with no list.
wwwDOTporn2videosDOTcom

3. sitewide links:
I received sitewide links and in webmaster tools, at one point i witnessed a drop in traffic when the number of incoming links was updated. Actually i received 3000 links from the same domain each time the list of incoming links was updated. At one point, Google removed those spammy websites from the ingoing links of webmaster tools.


....
in other words, be cautious

it worked really well even if you used to trade with shitty sites. After all these pandas, penguinds, farmers, etc. it is harder to rank, but still worth to trade links. Backlinks will always be benefit for rankings.

As for you questions:

pagerank is useless, better see if it is indexed by SEs;
look at alexa rank
block german site owners
block shitty link owners

I blocked almost half of the users and now trading seems to be easier. Still, linkspun has issues and is not as good as it was before. And it is getting slower.

There's nothing wrong with linkspun, you can look at the sites and make your own choices, you don't have to trade, if you get a link in a blog sidebar that generates 15,000 inbound that's your dumb ass choice.

There are quality sites on LS for trades, it's just not easy to find them. The upcoming paid upgrade should help separate the wheat from the chaff.

Most trade offers i got at linkspun where shitty.... i had to link to their top premium sites... no good deal.

I used Linkspun for about a year but ended up quitting after a number oftrades that I had ended up requesting that I end the trades because their sites were getting killed by Google so they were stopping everything. After a few of those I just decided there wasn't even there for me to work with and cancelled my account.