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Is there anyone left in the Web marketing world who thinks reciprocal links are still useful...?
Most of the talk and posts I read on the forums say that reciprocal liks are dead. Don't work. Cause search rank penalties.
It's too bad, really, because lost in all the commotion is the fact that not all reciprocal links are created equal, and many sites can and do benefit from offering reciprocal links.
What happened?
A few years back Web marketers learned that inbound links (IBLs) could help their search rank. Blame the Google Pagerank toolbar, if you must. The resulting frenzy to attract links resulted in some tactics that were less than ideal.
For example, the standard links page suddenly became the center of activity for search engine ranking purposes, which was never what a links page was supposed to be. Everyone started swapping links with everyone else in a nasty sort link orgy that found hardware stores linking to tanning salons and dentist's linking to accountants. All in the name of improved rankings.
And it failed, I'm happy to say.
It failed because search engnes like to feel a degree of confidence in the rationale for one site linking to another. Call it trust, call it faith, call it relevance. Once people realized that their unorganized random reciprocal links pages accomplished absolutely nothing, the second mad rush began to remove those un-themed reciprocal links pages so as not to be found algorithmiocally guilty by the Google gods. Some said the engines penalized sites with random recips, and even ignored their links altogether.
Caught up in the storm was the mild-mannered legitimate reciprocal links page that was perfectly themed, relevant, honest, and only swapped links with sites that were the same. Some stayed true to their mission, while others started selling links, unable to resist the money being thrown at them.
So where are we now? When it comes to reciprocal links pages, here are a couple truths you can take with you.
1). I think we'd all agree the following statement is false:
Every pair of reciprocal links in the world can be trusted as a 100% unbiased vote of quality between the two reciprocating Web sites.
2). If the above is false then I think we'd also agree that the engines would be nuts if they did not analyze reciprocity in some way so as to try and identify a level of trust or relevancy, and to identify scams, link farms, and self-run recip networks.
3). If #2 above is true, then it's logical that the engines could, I repeat C O U L D make a decision to ignore, credit, or even penalize based upon what they find.
4). Recips are still a great way to spread the word about your content and build relevant traffic, if they are done carefully and with the user in mind, not the search engines.
Eric Ward
http://www.ericward.com
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Comments
Great points, especially #4. If we really think about, even the search engine is thinking about the user, no?
After all, isn't the content of a search engine fresh, relevant results to the user?
Posted by: Mike Sansone | 09.25.06
Hi Eric,
Glad to see that you have not bought into the out-of-control bashing of reciprocation that is taking place in the SEO world.
I guess some people just don't undersand how reciprocation works, when done correctly.
When done properly, as you describe, it still works. It's not a solution for every site, but it's a link-building option that has it's place, among others.
Posted by: Dirk Johnson | 09.25.06
Eric,
Thanks for reminding webmasters that reciprocal linking is acceptable when done correctly. It's nice to see someone like you who carries a good bit of weight among the seo crowd making these comments.
We tell our own users to avoid recip link networks that do not afford any editorial discretion. Making links with editorial discretion for the end user's benefit (not the SEs) still works and the long term benefits on making relevant links is cost effective for most small businesses.
Posted by: Joel Lesser | 09.26.06
Some people (especially "experts") like to make absolute statements, i.e,
Recips are dead
or
Paid links will get you banned
or
Too many links on a page hurts its value...
so they sound smart and on top of things. It bugs me when people use absolutes like proven truths. In this industry their are no absolutes, except to say their are no absolutes :)
Give me any absolute and I'll give you a scenario that disproves it.
Eric
Posted by: Eric Ward | 09.26.06
Couldn't agree with you more. If there is a purpose in reciprocal linking (beyond trying to manipulate the search engines) I think marketers should go ahead and do it.
Posted by: Manoj Aravindakshan | 09.28.06
Nice post. In addition to selling ads for the magazine I work for, I'm also the webmaster, and we offer a link exchange program, but have a set of guidelines that must be adhered to before a recip link will be approved. The main thing we look for is relevance to our web site, our content and our readers. Without any relevance, there's no point in linking. When you visit a links page on a web site for cliff diving it shouldn't have a link to underwater basketweaving...there is obviously some misalignment there. No offense intended to my awesome cliff-diving and underwater-basketweaving friends out there!
Posted by: Daniel Monday | 09.28.06
Of course, it is quite possible that a cliff-diver may want to learn about underwater basketweaving, perhaps as a second career in case, while diving, they got stuck underwater. Both professions spend significant time underwater, ergo, recip makes sense after all!
See, no absolutes? :)
Posted by: Eric | 09.28.06
Touche! You're quite right. Shortly after submitting the comment I realized the connection between the two. Perhaps I should have tried harder to arbitrarily pick two completely distant activities, like mountain climbing and quilt making...then again, I guess it can get pretty cold up there on those peaks. You're right, no absolutes! Ok, I'm off to cliff dive and weave the world's greatest basket...underwater. ;)
Posted by: Daniel Monday | 10.02.06
I have linked to sites such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, Techmeme, Small Business SEM, Search Engine Watch, and the list goes on. I have done so because I either found something resourceful to my readers, something that helped to support what I was writing about or simply due to the fact that the site I linked to was the original source of my own writing. These same sites have in turn linked back to our site for the very same reasons. That is true reciprocal linking. So is this a bad thing? Is Google, or any other search engine going to devalue those links because they are not true "one-way" links? I don't think so. This is a natural process of the web and search engines are smart enough to understand that.
Posted by: Alfred Malveo | 11.19.07
It works for my sites, backlinks - not sure why forums are always misleading.
-D
http://techrunch.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Desmond Haynes | 04.11.08