Too much link exchange leads to penalty
 

I made dozens of link exchanges in the last year and traffic started to decrease last two months. After I disavowed some backlinks, traffic increased.

Less is more when it comes to link exchange!

Quality over Quanity

Depends on the keyword competition. I still see high ranked sites with a shitload of spam backlinks in keywords without much competition in adult. Or search, for example, a camgirl nick and you'll find first page results filled with stolen (DMCA ignoring) content. Next to none of those sites' backlinks come from 'quality' sites. Other metrics are winning them the google love.

But if you don't use a ton of stolen content, quality and relevance over quantity seems worthwhile.

As always, you need to know what you are doing.

Check out what top competitors are doing and you will know what to do.

How to check that? Any SEO tool for backlink would provide data?

Focus on content first, you'd might even rank in the top 3 spots without a single backlink.

Cheers to that advice!

were you exchanging recip links (A-B, B-A)? were your link texts unrelated to your domain name and repetitive? what was the overall quality of linkbacks? what's their link portfolio? is it possible that some your linking partners got deindexed or penalized? wasn't it easier to contact your linking partners to remove your links before doing disavow?

there's just too many factors that need to be accounted before making any real conclusions.

Have loads of websites to analyse your links.
Backlinkrz.com , SeoFreeTool.com , SeoToolFree.com , MarketingWebmasters.com , Submit.services , Trafficlocate.com , TrafficProtect.com , Trafficstats.org , Traffic.services , Traffic.tools , Valuation.site and Webmaster.software for even more tools.
Exchanges
Backlinkurls.com , Links.exchange , Trafficrz.com

Good info

Thanks sir