Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've exhausted all possible directories and other sites that can put a link to my site (and I'm also thinking about other sites I'm making now and in the future).
So when it comes to getting more sites linking to you, it seems that the last option is to submit to directories that will link to you, but only if you link to them, usually by placing their logo on your site with a hyperlink.
I don't like this for two reasons:
1. People may become distracted and leave your site for one of the links, which could be a directory with your competitors.
2. It doesn't look professional to have links to a bunch of directories. Some of them don't even want it on a "links" page, they want it on a "regular" page.
3. I hear Google doesn't like "reciprocal" links, they prefer "one way" links - a link to your site, but no link back to the other site.
But, I've got a few websites that are desparate to do well on Google, and I'm confused. Should I give in and put reciprocal links, or hold out for something better. If yes, what?
I also hedge my bets by seeking one-way, incoming links by syndicating articles to other sites whenever the site I'm working on has potential article material that fit with their theme.
If your site has potential for generating articles, you might want to look into this. You can write informative articles (namely, not just a promotion of your site, but genuinely useful information on a topic closely related to your site). Submit your articles to various ezine syndication sites (following their guidlines of what they're looking for, of course). Your article will have a byline that will link to your site and will be posted on that site, plus it will have potential of being picked up and posted on any other sites looking for content on that topic.
Or, if you want to be even more proactive, you can target specific sites that you would like links from, but that gets a little tricky, as you can easily get accused of spamming if you don't present your offer wisely (namely, make sure they're interested in seeing your article before you send it).
Another idea for one-way links is, if you have newsworthy info to report, you can submit press releases to online press release sites.
I have links from press releases I submitted for clients years ago that still show up in their backlinks.
People can theorize and with the right words can probably put up a compelling argument, but when I look at my personal experience and that of others, I have to strongly disagree with the notion that Google dislikes recips.
Mack.
I hear Google doesn't like "reciprocal" links, they prefer "one way" links - a link to your site, but no link back to the other site.
I don't know where that is written in stone ... I rather doubt it is, but I do believe it may be true to a certain extent. Everyone has their own theory, but nobody has proof!
If you think about it logically though, a one way link "out" ... speaks volumes, whereas a reciprocal link only says you "very likely" know each other to some extent or you may have a business agreement to promote each other's sites because you are doing so in an attempt to create false PR.
Whatever! I link to whomever I think offers content which is germaine to the topic of my page and I couldn't give a flying fig about what Google or any other search engine thinks of the sites I link to. I link to other "useful sites" for the benefit of my customers ... and for no other reason.
Linking and the motivation behind it will drive you mad if you let it. I prefer to just link for the sake of supplying convenient and pertinent information to my potential customers ... and because I truly think that's the way the web is meant to be.
The more we worry about Google and how they deal with reciprocal links, the more we allow them to control how the WWW will evolve. Do what you want and to heck with the search engines. Its your site!
I also really like the idea of press releases and articles. Now I just have to find some websites that might like to receive an article or press release. That should be good in many ways.
What should the maximum amount of links on a website be?
The more links leaving a particular page, the weaker the "vote" represented by each link.
The rule of thumb seems to be that (from the perspective of the recipient of the link), it is desirable for there to be no more than perhaps 20 or 30 links on a specific page.
More importantly, there is no logical upward limit on the number of links leaving a site. DMOZ and Yahoo have literally millions of links leaving their sites.
Still more important is to make sure there the links are organized into themes, so that they are more useful to users, and don't appear to a Search Engine as some a chaotic "free for all."
Natural reciprocal links can provide a real value to the web. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Arranged reciprocal links are probably where trouble might pop up. And even then I suspect it would only be if it was an excessive number. Of course, no one really knows what that number might be.
As with most things G, moderation is all, the recent Pat App included link exchange as a potential links scheme, a first,AFAIK.
[0077] ... A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links.
...a first,AFAIK.
Not a first. You may have read it here first in a post from January 2005 regarding "Is link spam killing high quality, theme related link development?" [webmasterworld.com].
Then a follow-up post from February.
New Link Spamming Technique
...and it smells like Reciprocal Links?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Nothing wrong with link exchanges. They happen in the wild...
Don't know how I missed those threads..:-(
20 off-topic recips versus a single on-topic one-way, no contest, 20 ON-topic recips might give me pause for thought though ;-)
The test case would be something like getting a 1-way links from a PR4 page that has a total of 25 links on the page vs getting a reciprocated links from an identically weighted page.
I would agree that in this case a 1-way link has slightly more influence, but only slightly more. Let's say it has 33% more power, just for argument's sake. Thus, we could say a reciprocal link has a power of 3 and a 1-way link has a power of 4. Thus, you only need 30 1-way links to have the same effect as 40 reciprocated links.
However, getting 1-way links is significantly more difficult than getting reciprocal links, and it's not 33% harder, more like 300% harder. Okay, maybe you really know what you are doing and it's only twice as hard to get 1-way links.
So it would thus take twice as much effort to get 30 1-way links as it takes to get 30 reciprocal links. Or, it takes the same amount of effort to get 30 1-way links as it takes to get 60 reciprocal links. Above, I figured that 30 1-way links is equal to 40 reciprocal links, but here we figure. It all boils down to this:
Reciprocal links are 150% more powerful than 1-way links, when the amount of effort (time/money) involved is used to weigh the result.
Pound-for-pound, dollar-for-dollar, you cannot beat reciprocal links for ROI.
I was quite liberal with giving 1-way links a lot of credit in the above figuring. A more accurate assessment would probably be that a 1-way link is only about 10% better than a reciprocal link, and it is probably 3 to 4 times more difficult to get 1-way links than it is to get reciprocal links. If you were to use these figures you would find that reciprocals have about 3.6 times as much bang for the buck/effort as 1-way links have.
So, yes, 1-way links are better. However, I prefer a high ROI on my time, energy, effort, and resources and as a result I focus on reciprocal links. It works, and it's easier.
I can see you're an enthusiast ;-)
Some people believe that 1-way links are way better than reciprocated links, like 5 times or 10 times better. I have never understood why some people think this.
Absolutely true! An easy proof is to check how many sites have gained really high PR because of reciprocal links and how many because of one-way ones... I think that 5 or 10 times is a low estimation though!
A more accurate assessment would probably be that a 1-way link is only about 10% better than a reciprocal link, and it is probably 3 to 4 times more difficult to get 1-way links than it is to get reciprocal links.
Neuron, the assumption you made is really amazing! :)
I can easily show you hundreds of sites that have PR2 or PR3 and enjoy so many reciprocal links. One of my websites has PR6 with just few one-way links from authoritative sites though.
You are very correct regarding how hard it is to gain one-way links, but their ROI cannot be compared with that of reciprocal ones for sure.
Also interesting was the fact that Google checks for off-topic, I hadn't considered that.
Hope you didn't get that from me PD, I wouldn't dare claim that ;-)
For example I produce Home Portraits used as a closing gifts. I have and will continue to link with sites whose market is Real Estate Agents (or Framers/Galleries).
I have been doing it for less than a month and I see my traffic and sales increasing.
I understand that the long time goal should be my position in the search Engines. However I read a recent article that claimed in a recent survey only 6% of the traffic was created by Search Engines and over 46% was generated by links.
billdisc
billdisc, interesting about the stats on how many hits come from links vs search engines. If that's the case, then a few of my sites should be doing very well if I could just get more inbound links. The site I made for my friend's driving school is accounting for (according to her), about 50% of her enrollments. And she only gets about 5 or 6 unique visitors a day! (The other half comes from her yellow pages ad, online mostly, but give it another year and I think more business will come from word of mouth referrals).
Some of the linkage patterns I see in that sector would keep me awake at night, maybe just concentrate on the ones in your area of operations?
Are non-reciprocating links better than reciprocating links?
Thought Experiment. Put your SEO where your mouth is.
[webmasterworld.com...]
An organised recip link campaign cannot but fall within the ambit of a links scheme designed to improve PR or rankings, G may not have acted much on this to date, but the inclusion of "exchanging links" in that sentence in the Pat App is IMO, ominous.
0077] The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links. Examples of documents that give links without editorial discretion include guest books, referrer logs, and "free for all" pages that let anyone add a link to a document.
You can get one-way links "from documents without editorial discretion on making links" just as easily as you can from Reciprocal Link Exchanges, so I don't see your point here, glen. Are you saying that recip links are created without editorial discretion and 1-ways are? Can't we just limit the difference between them to one being a 1-way links and one being a recip, so that we can fairly compare them and say that one-way links are better than recips? Can 1-ways be gotten without editorial discretion? Is it any better than a recip withtout discretion? Can't we assume both are on target, from relevant pages so that we can judge them fairly, side-by-side, toe-to-toe?
There's nothing "ominous" at all about the reference to "exchanging links" in the google patent unless you are in the habit of getting discretionless links, and the reference to "exchanging links" seems to actually say they are OKAY as long as they are on target and applied with discretion. Is there any valid reason for being so discriminating against recips? Is this bias founded on anything real or is it nothing more than a distaste, like a racial prejudice that helps one feel they are somehow superior, yet founded in ignorance?
Apart from the links scheme matter, not really ;-)
So, perhaps if we could limit the comparison between 1-way links and recips to both be on relevant pages, editorially reviewed and approved. Let's say we have one page on widgets that links to two widget sites. For Link1 the link is reciprocated by the receiving site, for Link2 the link is not reciprocated. Now, how much more powerful is Link2 than Link1? If so, how and why?
Please can we just forget about all this scheming stuff, which applies just as much to 1-way links as to reciprocals? Is it possible an objective answer can be found? Is it even possible for people discussing this to be objective?
