Question ...

Aren't links that take visitors away from your site to a competitors site, a bad thing?

I so often come across the web sites of small developers, web sites that they hope will encourage me to download and try their games, that have along the left or right edge of site links that will take me to the sites of other game developer. And these links are very often in the form of animated, eye-catching images.

I know the idea is to help each other out, to help drive traffic to each others sites, free advertising and so on, but...aren't those developers also the compentiton? Why make it so easy for a potential customer to get hold of their product?

I was reminded of this when I read the thread about Link Swapping. Yes, all the added links will help improve your page rankings, but it leads to the same dilemma: visitors find their way to your site and your making easy for them to find their way to your competitors site.

Enlightenment? Opinoins?

A common opinion on this topic is that if someone is going to your links page, they're already leaving your site. Our links page is listed on our sidebar, but it doesn't get a lot of visitors compared to our other pages. Many good web traffic analyzers will show you the most common exit pages for your site. 0.68% of our visitors this month left our site through our links page.

My opinion is that if someone isn't interested in our content, we might as refer them to another site that is doing the same for us. I know the process works in reverse, since we see sales every week that come from sites that link to ours (as measured by our cookie tracking). I'm certain that others are getting a few sales from us this way as well.

The main benefit though, is what I mentioned before -- swapping links increases both sites' link popularity, which will improve both sites' search engine rankings.

This reminds me of a similar debate when I was a struggling musician. Bands would argue about whether or not they should help out rival bands, figuring that they were the competition and not to be encouraged.
Then people pointed out that, although you might consider another small local pub band to be your competitor and vice versa, its the likes of Kylie Minogue, Oasis and the Spice Girls, with their million selling albums, that were the real competition.

When you are a huge mega publisher or developer like ID software, you don't want to give for example, the makers of Unreal Tournament any publicity, as between you, you are carving up the market and if he sells an extra 50k units, chances are you lost 50k sales.

But if I am selling 50 games a month, and site B is shifting 50 games a month, I think the real concern is going to be site C, shifting 20,000 games a month. If sites A and B get together to help raise both sites profiles, we can both end up selling 100 games a month, and site C probably won't even notice the sales dip.

I can understand the opposite POV, but I strongly believe that as the 'oppressed minority', indie games developers should stick together, not fight amongst ourselves. Of course anybody who doesn't want to work that way doesnt have to, good luck all the same.