The past few days I've been thinking about what I've been doing to my websites lately. I've added javascript to link exchanges, added javascript to my internal linking system and used a lot of other tricks to improve my site's rankings. And it hasn't helped me a single bit so far.

Now I'm thinking, is SEO worth the trouble? For one, link partners won't like it when you turn their links into javascript. I guess that's more of a conscious thing. Beside that, all the optimizations don't make it easier to maintain my websites.

Now I'm thinking, wouldn't it be better to just do a lot of link trades to get traffic instead of spending all this time on SEO with few or no results? All those inbound links should get you a better search engine ranking in the end, right?

Perhaps I just put too much time in it and was expecting too much.

I'd like to read some of your opinions on this, as I'm considering to change my websites back to as they were before I started SEO.

I hope I'm making any sense