A Year Old Widget Company Wants To Buy 1000 Reciprocal Links

What advice could you give me to help them not to do anything wrong?

[Christyl Stevens]

I would like to know what those of you with experience in the current landscape of link development that understands all of the various issues that are associated with it would advise a company with the following scenario to do?

A (widget) company has a Website that was professionally designed over a year ago. They were never in favor of setting up a reciprocal links directory on their domain and thought that since they provided unique and quality content that various other Websites would want to naturally link to their site.

Well, in the course of a year they have less than a dozen links to their site and they are not found in the top 100 results for their main keywords.

They now want to move forward with a reciprocal links directory on their site and are thinking about using a service that specializes in reciprocal links for (widget) sites.

This company has various packages that range from 100 links to 1000 links.

...so I am wondering if this (widget) company did acquire 1000 reciprocal links in a week would the search engines look at this in a favorable way or not?

I mean, would they see this as legitimate links or might this type of service get the (widget) company into trouble at all?

Any advice that you could provide would be most appreciated.

What can you say to help me to understand about the business of link development?

<snip>

TIA

[edited by: martinibuster at 10:01 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2005]
[edit reason] Please, no specifics. As Brett Says, let's talk about the symptoms, not the patient. [/edit]

[justdave]

Do not do it. From what I know, that's a very shady scenario and I would stay clear of it. If you want to start a linking campaign, don't try to do it all at once. Spread it out over months. I would keep it limited.

Be very wary of any sites that offer that type of service. You have a good chance of getting into trouble if you use them.

That's just my to cents. I'm sure there are other opinions.

[notredamekid]

Here's advice: Build ten good one-way links instead. Or even a hundred.

Write an article, get it syndicated. Distribute a press release. Pay for listings in some well-known directories. That should get you started.

[jonnyzone]

Probably a silly question...

Hypothetically, what if the 1000 links were quality links that were relevant to widgets? Would acquiring that many links at one time still be a detrement to moving up in the serps?

[Tigrou]

Another part of the solution is to submit to all the one-way free directories out there. Sure it takes a LOT of time but is worth it.

The "bonus" there is that you do the work in one go and the links build up over 2 months.

After you've got that baseload you are more likely to get away with dodgy recip schemes etc..

CF

[neuron]

...so I am wondering if this (widget) company did acquire 1000 reciprocal links in a week would the search engines look at this in a favorable way or not?

Favorable. However, let me qualify that. A "reciprocal link" is comprised of two links, your outgoing link to them, and their link to you. As long as you link to decent quality sites you will be fine. It is who YOU link to that can hurt you, not who links to you.

While it is certainly possible to get 1000 links in one week, it is highly unlikely the search engines will know this because not all sites get indexed thoroughly and regularly. Many link exchange pages have lower PR than the main pages of a site and are not spidered nearly as often. Thus, out of 1000 links, maybe 50 would be on PR5 or higher pages and these would be discovered immediately. 100 or so might be from PR4 pages, and would be discovered within a week or so. 200 would be from PR3 pages and would be discovered in 3 weeks to a month. The rest would be discovered over a longer period of time, extending the impact of the links over the next few months. Generally, the full impact will be felt within 3 months. Some of the links may never be discovered by the search engines unless you take some action to get those linked pages indexed.

There are many fear mongers amoung us and some will tell you that if you acquire links too fast your site will be penalized. Some will tell you that 20 links per month is a good rate and exceeding that will put you at risk. I think it is probably more the case that this person cannot get links at a rate that exceeds this, and thus re-inforces his own sense of self worth by saying "I'm just being cautious". I also think there may be some confusion on what type of links are involved. As long as you just get a single link per domain (preferably a single link per IP) and move on, you will be fine.

I have gotten 1000 direct reciprocals in a week and I have done so more than once. While the effect is not always dramatic, it usually is. I have never seen one of these sites get penalized in any way. Indeed, I utterly DOMINATE my industry. Your milage may vary in other industries.

Also note that link development takes time. Generally, the more time it takes the greater the quality, the more selective you can be in who you exchange links with.

[lovethecoast]

Another idea is to make sure your add url page has the words "add url" -- that way someone in your industry can look for "widget add url" and they'll be able to find you (this is a good place to start looking for relevent link partners as well).

Another thing we've done with semi-decent success is to use adwords to let others in your industry know you're interested in trading links. We've been doing this for about 6-8 months now for one particular site and have picked up 15 *very* good links (we're very picky who we exchange links with and have rejected over 100 during that time).

S