Forum Moderators: martinibuster
How many of you are still going after reciprocal link exchanges on major scale?
I checked out some of my competiton and they seem to do very well in ranking based on quality reciprocal link campaigns.
northweb
Recips work great for branding a website among a specific realm of interest, and they ARE counted by search engines and factor into link popularity and search returns.
Are recips a tool for overnight success in serps? No. But have they been blacklisted by search engines? No. Search engines realize websites link with each other.
The trick we have discussed here so many times is HOW you obtain links through recips. If you do it slowly and naturally with sites highly relevant to yours, it works. If you go after very high volume in short periods of time, it doesn't work. Make sure you ALWAYS maintain editorial discretion when making recip linking decisions. Don't use full duplex softwares.
Your competition is ranking well most likely because they are obtaining recips on a trend that doesn't bust threshholds search engines are watching for.
reciprocal linking is not good these days.
It's so easy to say "find one way links" but that is always easier said than done.
Many sites won't link if they cannot get a link back.
Still works.
Thanks,
Bilal Qayyum
Just need to clear the air with reciprocal linking!
How many of you are still going after reciprocal link exchanges on major scale?
I think for content sites, relavent recipricals have worth. Just not as much as one-ways, and as long as they part of a balanced diet. I mean, backlink profile
like I mentioned a competitor with a shopping cart systems has had top 3 ranking for many keywords in a competitive market. In fact he has not budged in his ranking. He has built it with recipical links and only a few one way links. This was done over a two year period.
You say that reciprocal links are no good but seem to suggest worthless link spamming of directories, bookmarks, rss, directories, and blogs.
At least a reciprocal link would be more likely to be an on topic link.
I'm about to start doing some reciprocal linking for a site that I have that hasn't ranked for anything for a long time. We'll see how it goes...
As an example, we belong to a group of booksellers which have a set of reciprocal links consisting of a set of names (as the link) with individual small writeups about the store. Everyone puts up basically the same page on their site. Is this useful - even by a small amount? Is it harmful?
As a collateral issue, should the "association" be limited to somewhat less than a 100 members?
[edited by: martinibuster at 3:50 am (utc) on Nov. 29, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed URL. See TOS. [/edit]
There is a risk factor for these arrangements. The risk generally corresponds to the level of search ranking success you experience with it, as well as the scale of the project. One search engineer (not Matt) informally told me he personally didn't mind light reciprocals but he also stated he disliked reciprocal link directories bolted on to sites.
This has been discussed before but maybe it's time for a review. There is a phenomenom where it's beneficial for competitors to group together. It makes sense for ten restaurants to open across the street and next to one another. This creates a destination, a restaurant row and people begin to associate a geographic area as the place to go to eat out.
A similar notion has been floated that one can interlink somewhat related sites and achieve a similar kind of traffic exchange, where visitors to site A are very likely to be interested in sites B through M and vice-versa. For instance, a children's shoe retailer can refer visitors to a sweater maker, wooden toy retailer, and a merchant who sells children's beds.
These are partners who understand they can increase sales by pooling together site visitors likely to purchase from them, sharing visitors the same way mall stores share visitors. There are different ways to share.
You can link to each other and help each other rank. As far as I know and understand, nobody's been banned for a little light interlinking. Or you can go for sales and add links to partners in your thank you page after a site visitor has made a transaction. If you enjoyed shopping here, you may enjoy visiting sites B through M. Or do both. :)
But as I said earlier, there is some risk associated with the scale of the project and it's success. It may still rank and never experience problems at all. But there is still a level of risk to consider. I'm not saying don't do it, just throwing it out there that it's good to have an idea of where the boundaries lie.
Let this question be your guiding star: "If I link to this site, would the link make good sense to users?"
As far as whether or not search engines count recips, they absolutely do. It may have less worth when they find there is a link going both ways, but i'd rather have a reciprocal link with an informational (authority) site than no link at all, wouldn't you?
Keep in mind, we're not just talking about search engines. These links do bring visitors to your site as well. I'm not going to turn down 100 visitors per month from a website just because they insist on me linking to them in exchange for a link to us. That'd be kind of silly. You can't focus solely on search engines, you have to keep it well rounded because that's what counts most.
That being said, i've stopped doing reciprocal link exchanges because they are too time-consuming and i don't get enough positive results. With ECommerce sites it's usually pretty easy to get a one-way link from a customer by sending a follow-up email after orders requesting a review/link on their website. This obviously works best if you run B2B ECommerce but it also works for standard retail customers. I normally offer an incentive such as a 10% discount or something, although this is a flexible percentage based on what kind of link they give you... for example, a customer who is willing to create a stand-alone page on the site that has a review of the product they purchased is perfect. Customers who merely provide a link may get a smaller discount. In this kind of economy it's a good idea to offer discounts because people will most likely act on that, which ultimately results in more traffic to your site and hopefully more sales.
I'm about to do just that, remove my links page full of relevant sites that I have exchanged links with, because I don't know what else to do to get my pages back. But I need a second opinion because now I'm not so sure.
how was it categorized? how many links were on it? how many were irrelevant to your business? at which rate did you obtain the links?
Was the information you received in the GWHG from a Google employee or just someone who claims to be an expert on Google serps? I ask because there are lots of folks in the GWHG that act like they work for G but they do not.
See my previous post. Says it all. ;)
The risk generally corresponds to the level of search ranking success you experience with it, as well as the scale of the project. One search engineer (not Matt) informally told me he personally didn't mind light reciprocals but he also stated he disliked reciprocal link directories bolted on to sites.
First I want to stress what an SEO newbie I am. I've said it in other posts and I'll repeat it here.
About a week ago, I wrote a small article for my e-commerce site about widget care. First I wrote down all the ideas and information I had about that topic, then searched the web to get some complementary ideas. I even went as far as going to a site that has relevance to mine and asked them if I could quote some parts of their info and in exchange I'd link to them. They agreed and even said they didn't need me to acknowledge copyrights as long as they got a link from me (outbound that is).
In the end, I didn't use the information from their site, only a picture (which I used as a link to one of their product pages). I used some other links, a couple links to wikipedia and that's about it. To my surprise, just a couple days later, my article was in the first page in Google under those keywords (3 keywords). Now, those aren't competitive keywords, but I managed to show up 1st page in Google with a decent written article just days after I posted it. For now, my PR show is 0 (I heard that's better than PR gray) but I'm pretty sure the company I linked to will get what you guys call "page juice" instead of a plain and simple directory (I have one in my site but it has PR gray atm and has been up long before this article I wrote).
Where I want to go with this is that (and I'm 100% sure I read this somewhere in this forum or maybe another) that there is a way to do reciprocal linking by writing articles and linking to the sites you want to reciprocal with. I am fully aware that is a lot of work, but from this experience, I believe your outbound links will be more valuable and your link partners will be more grateful and the so-called "content-hungry users" will be happy too because they will have something to read and at the same time may click on the links (as a customer, I never go to the "resources", "links", etc pages when I'm browsing e-commerce sites).
My 0.02
[edited by: Argentdreamer at 2:51 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2008]
i don't think so that an outbound gives you rank, it may be just becuase of your unique content you wrote. bcz outbound usually leaving your site and linking to another site. the benefit is on other side who receiving the link. no you man :O
Probably I didn't explain myself correctly in the post. I wasn't implying that outbound links gave you PR. What I was saying is that an outbound link that comes from an article has more weight (importance) to the receiver than if it came from a simple directory.
If two relevant sites wanted to help each other with reciprocal links, a smart way to do so would be to write an article about a topic relevant to each others site and insert the links there.
Now, this is my opinion, I'm not giving facts here, FYI.
What I was saying is that an outbound link that comes from an article has more weight (importance) to the receiver than if it came from a simple directory.
That seems pretty simple but there is a bit more than that. :)
A link that comes naturally, whether it be from an article or a directory probably are equal in value with all things being equal to begin with.
Of course any links that are "inline" within an article are always going to be the creme of the crop. They just sit there surrounded by all this wonderful relevant text and they are by far one of the more sought after types of links.
If two relevant sites wanted to help each other with reciprocal links, a smart way to do so would be to write an article about a topic relevant to each others site and insert the links there.
Heh, I think you're on to something!
Now, this is my opinion, I'm not giving facts here, FYI.
I might be as brazen to say that it is fact. What you describe above is one of the natural progressions of link reciprocation.
If I'm writing an article and I used a particular website(s) as a reference, I'm going to link to that reference naturally. Whether it be an inline link or an author link at the close of the article, it is just natural. I'm not hoping for a reciprocal but I've found that many over time see the incoming traffic from my article and link back, that's as natural as it gets.
I have Google Alerts set up for all sorts of http: references to see where sites are being mentioned. I will follow almost every one of those and investigate the mention. If I like what I see, I may provide a reciprocal in the process, in fact, I do it all the time. That seems like the most natural way to me. Build something worthy, drop a few hints here and there, and let her rip. Things will happen "naturally" over time. The more you force it, the more you raise the level of risks involved with the highest level of risk being human intervention.
Google has some very detailed patents in this link development area that are well worth the read if you can withstand and understand the black and white of it all. ;)
sirkevon, Can you tell us more about your links page?
how was it categorized? how many links were on it? how many were irrelevant to your business? at which rate did you obtain the links?Was the information you received in the GWHG from a Google employee or just someone who claims to be an expert on Google serps? I ask because there are lots of folks in the GWHG that act like they work for G but they do not.
cnvi,
We actually have four different sites under one main umbrella site and they all have a links page with links to other relevant sites. One of our sites sell lighting products, so our links page will have categories such as other lighting product sites, furniture, home improvement, interior design, exterior design, eco-friendly, etc. We do have a category of directories, which wasn't a good idea to begin with. I guess we have some categories not directly related, but in regards to martinibuster's reply, we do have a lot of outbound reciprocal links that Google might frown upon. If all four links page combined, there's well over 100 reciprocal links. These links were down sporadically though. Because not everyone wants to exchange links, I might get one or two a week back when I was doing it. I don't participate in link exchanges anymore so our links page has just been sitting there for the past 6 months.
There are, I think, only three Google people who participates in the group. The majority of replies on GWHG are mainly from other folks giving their 2 cents. They sound very adamant in what they think is wrong with your site when you give your URL. While I do not believe I found any evidence that the Google people on the group directly say don't do reciprocal linking, the other folks on the group thinks as if it is the bane of link building.
The use of link text as a description of what the link points to helps the search engine return relevant (and to some degree high quality) results. Finally, the use of proximity information helps increase relevance a great deal for many queries.
I've been learning a lot about SEO in this forum and everyday someone enlightens me with information that was unknown to me. I joined in June 2008 and before then, I knew nothing about SEO. Right now I'm struggling to optimize my site, my 2 main keywords are EXTREMELY competitive so I'm applying the "long tail" terms and try to find a niche...for now. I'm still learning, and there's a lot more I need to read in this forum.
I try to be cautious with what I post here because I'm aware that thousands if not more people visit this forum daily and I don't want to mislead them into wrong information, reason why I said I was giving my opinion.
Maybe in time, if my site becomes successful, I'll be able to post with more confidence, knowing that I won't be spilling BS, but for now, I'll try to be as cautious as I can be.
Anyway, I derailed the main topic enough with this post. Sorry :-)
