Reciprocal Linking. An Unbiased Analysis.
This is a post by Cristian Lungu
Reciprocal linking is without doubt one of the most disputed subjects in the SEO community. The reason for this is because they simultaneously can greatly contribute to your link network and also damage it pretty seriously.
One thing is certain though, Google is getting better by the semester in finding and demoting low quality link exchanges to zero and even negative values.
Search engines have not declared war to link reciprocation but rather to the unnatural linking patterns meant solely to increase the number of links and consequently, enhance rankings.
There are 2 directions to follow
- Build reciprocal links by going beyond you niche limits. This will benefit you short term but once practicing these obscure exchanges chances are you’ll get penalized.
- Staying in your field; although it takes more time to find and initiate quality link exchanges opportunities, keeping the relevancy level high will empower your sites position in that niche’s organic listings.
Still, keep in mind that it takes time to build a presence online and brand yourself. The good news is you build a solid foundation for selling your product or service.
After securing a considerable number of quality links pointing to your site, it’s advisable to diversify your linking sources and even include some low quality ones; and there is no easy alternative then reciprocal links.
This tactic it’s beneficial as it enables you to build relevancy for your website by extensively using targeted keywords as anchor texts.
Junky back links are not a thing to worry about as long as you don’t return the favor.
A white hat method for link exchange is reciprocal promotions, where each linking partner promotes content referencing the other party on their own website.
From a marketing perspective reciprocal links are especially valued for being an efficient medium for brand promotion. Still, if you can obtain a one way back link the better.
Then again, this statement is contradicted by our incorrigible human nature that constantly cries the “what’s in it for me” exception.
To make this human behavior work for you, you must gratify them with some top-notch content that they feel they must reference and discuss and debate around it, on social platforms, with blog posts, etc.
Another, more subtle approach to promoting your content is to present it among other relevant resources. This gains you credibility and impels the recipient to take note of your suggestions.
As 99% of automated link requests are simply ignored resume using such link scouting tools only to researching. Once a link exchange opportunity is spotted address the webmaster in person.
When to Drop Reciprocal Links as a strategy:-
Once you start getting involved with the reciprocal linking networks, consider this:
- The featured websites in these back link catalogues have at best 0 PageRank. Reciprocating with these low quality,( most importantly) irrelevant websites is easily spotted by Google.
- At best, these sites reach 10 pages in length, giving them no chance of ranking even in markets with low to no competition at all.
- Not only does their copy sounds as hype from a mile away but they’re also built in the spam religion with keyword stuffing in the title and description tags, etc.
- All things being said, common sense will tell you that you do not need these artificial linking schemes to get good rankings.
Reciprocal links are valuable, but not on their own. They must be included into a coherent link building campaign.
This information in this post is correct. I have found that exchanging likes will do nothing for you site. Getting links naturally will have more benefit than trying to spam.
Rob
.-= Read Rob Wagner@ Microloans´s last blog post>> ..Fast Business Loans | 5 Step Guide =-.
I think that using reciprocal link building will do nothing in regards to increasing anyone’s SEO.
Search engines would give more link juice to your site if the links that your generating are one way links.
I think as well that it does not help in anyway. Just build regular backlinks.
.-= Read bella@link building´s last blog post>> ..Check Your Link Popularity to Find Out Why People Do Not Link To You? =-.
What kind of testing did you do regarding reciprocal linking? As of very recently, Google has started to punish “Link Wheels” which are similar to reciprocal links, but more complicated. For me, I’ve had no luck what so ever with recip linking , so i’m curious what kind of controls you used.
To increase your Link Popularity, you must have as many quality and relevant websites linking to your website as possible. To do this, you could send out link requests to thousands of websites and hope that some will link to you. Most will not, and a few might as long as you link to them. This would create reciprocal linking which is now useless to increase your link popularity.
First i would like to know that how many types of linking are used to be in Seo and how it works in seo.
@brandon@prepaid legal services scam – I personaly dropped reciprical link building practice quiet sometime ago simply because they don’t work.
My resolve was to concentrate on building links naturaly as mentioned in many of my previous posts on here. You basicaly find relevant blogs to your own and comment (not spamming) on them. If another blogger’s post catches your attention then write a similar post and reference that blogger’s post, this will send a trackback to the blog and you get a natural link when it is aproved.
There are many stratergies that you can use to build links naturaly – I will try and cover them in my next post or in the very near future.
We have a good number of reciprocal links, but these are all naturally occuring especially when communicating with customers in a public forum. If Google totally discounted these links, or penalized because of them, many legitimate sites would suffer. So I too subscribe to your theory about niche related reciprocal links being ok. Besides ok, they are natural and to some extent help Google determine which companies are active in the web community.
Excellent information. Thank you for sharing this valuable information.
SO it means Link Exchange is not good for getting backlinks. Then why every one is mentioning “Link Exchange” in SEO.
.-= Read Bilal Ahmad´s last blog post>> ..Windows 7 Popular and Useful Applications =-.
I agree that reciprocal linking has little or no effect on SEO. These days, Google is too intelligent and has been cracking down on this practice.
Yes, reciprocal link building is not working anymore. It’s a dead end or even worse for your ranking. Just quality one way links are the best for your SEO.
.-= Read William@seo link building´s last blog post>> ..Remove Negative Results From Google – Is There A One Shot Cure? =-.
There’s no more reasons in reciprocal linking, but it still alive.
@Bilal Ahmad – It is not to say that link exchange is not a good thing. Infact if done correctly then it can be a very good thing for your site but it should not be the only methode used or relied upon for backlinks.
Furthermore – links exchanged naturally by good will carry more weight than those done through a “Link exchage” site – this is where the problem is and this is where Google is raising an eye brow!
.-= Read Zulfikar´s last blog post>> ..Blog Installation Service – A Forward Looking Vision =-.
Great post. Very informative. Site has been added to my RSS feed for later browsing.
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“One thing is certain though, Google is getting better by the semester in finding and demoting low quality link exchanges to zero and even negative values” true! and gone are the days of recipricals links being a high value