Google CEO Eric Schmidt must love controversy. In a speech to magazine executives Wednesday he called the internet “a cesspool”, AdAge reported.

I don’t know if that makes Google a sewerage company, but I think Schmidt should realize that many look at Google as their filter to the web. Employees like Matt Cutts spend all their time working on ‘purifying’ the results, to expect publishers to be the answer may not be the right approach.

Criticizing opponents to the Yahoo-Google ad deal may not be a smart move given the recent drop in value of the once “golden child” of the web. Schmidt challenged “if you are going to criticize us, criticize us properly.” Claiming ad prices would not increase under the Google Yahoo ad deal.

Schmidt displayed a certain amount of callous aloofness when he avoided questions about how publishers could improve their ranking with Google.

“”We don’t actually want you to be successful,” he said. The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system. “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance,” he added” AdAge reported.

If you call the web a cesspool but do not offer insights to quality content providers who pay money to provide professional journalism I don’t think you are serious about cleaning it up, so much as taunting an economically challenged industry.

Among all reasons behind good link exchange strategies, the best would be that it helps get a good lot of internet traffic to your website. You just need to find out other websites similar to yours and in direct competition with you for exchanging links. That way you will be able to get just the kind of targeted viewers you want to come to your site.

Integral to great link exchange strategies is the hunt of fine and apt websites. This can even furnish your website with some quality content. And, as is popularly known by all webmasters, well-written content in the site is the key approach to creating a solid web presence and the best way to get spotted by search engines. Finding out a huge list of sites to exchange links with can be the first step to your strategies, but it cannot stop at that. If you really want to get benefited, you must make sure about the quality of the sites too. Whenever you trade links, do it with sites that have quality content and an established web presence.

Another great and extremely helpful link exchange strategy is to exchange links with informative websites, those having good information on topics related to your site. This not only keeps your site updated, but also attracts visitors and potential targeted traffic to your pages in search for more. It would be even wiser if you can write a few lines on your site about why you advocate visiting those links on your page. It would be seen as authentic and as useful to your visitors.

Looking out for websites having keywords related to your site can again be one fine idea for structuring your link exchange strategies. The easiest way to go about this is to type your keywords in a search engine and analyze the list of websites shown in the search results. From these, you can then pick websites that you think would be worthy of a link exchange. However, try limiting your choice to the first and second result pages because websites in these first two pages draw the maximum traffic and would therefore be able to benefit you in a link exchange.

To check the performance of your link exchange strategies, you can simply enter the URL of your site in the search box of a search engine and get an entire list of websites whom you exchanged links with and who still have your link on their pages. That way you can judge your strategies better.