Skip to main content

Should I do reciprocal linking on my site?


Reciprocal links are touch and go for a few reasons.

The reason that incoming links are good is that search engines think your site is worthwhile if humans are linking to it. In other words, if a webmaster reviews your content and links to it then your content must be good (thinks the search engine).

So people actively started to try and build links, to make search engines think that their content is good.

The only thing is that search engines hate it when you do things just to optimize your site for search engines. Optimize your site for users, while making it easy for search engines to see what it's about (this is where the bold, italics, page title and headings come in)

Search engines see reciprocal links as a distortion. The webmaster is not linking to you because your content is good, they're only linking to you because they're getting something in return (a link to their site, or even money). If you have a page of links that link to sites that are linking to you a search engine is going to realize that none of those links actually mean anything. They're going to think that you're trying SEO "tricks".

Google specifically warns against "excessive" reciprocal linking, but doesn't quantify this. So if you find a nice juicy site that insists on a reciprocal link then fine - give them a link from an article. Never create a page of reciprocal links to a whole bunch of worthless sites that are irrelevant, or have low page rank. Think how easy it would be for a search engine to spot this.

Google puts this a whole lot better than I can (in their Guidelines for Webmasters) when they say "make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. ... Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

They expand on this when defining link schemes.

Two better alternatives to reciprocal linking are to use link bait and to submit your site to RSS aggregators. Don't go rushing off to build hundreds of reciprocal links to other sites. Rather spend your energy building your site into a great resource that people will want to visit (and link to).

By the way, to report a site that is using link spam you can use the Google tool: http://goo.gl/linkspam . If you can use this tool, then your competitors can use it on you too.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using Azure Active directory as an OAuth2 provider for Django

Azure Active Directory is a great product and is invaluable in the enterprise space. In this article we'll be setting it up to provide tokens for the OAuth2 client credentials grant. This authorization flow is useful when you want to authorize server-to-server communication that might not be on behalf of a user. This diagram, by Microsoft, shows the client credentials grant flow. From Microsoft documentation  The flow goes like this: The client sends a request to Azure AD for a token Azure AD verifies the attached authentication information and issues an access token The client calls the API with the access token. The API server is able to verify the validity of the token and therefore the identity of the client. The API responds to the client Setting up Azure AD as an OAuth2 identity provider The first step is to create applications in your AD for both your API server and the client. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to register the applications o...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Word of the Day" PHP script (with word list)

I was looking around for a way to generate a word of the day on the web and didn't find anything. So I coded a quick and dirty script to do it. Just in case anybody does a Google search and manages to find my blog: here is my Word of the Day PHP script : Copy this code snippet into a wordoftheday.php file: $file = fopen("interesting_words.txt","r"); $raw_string = fread($file,filesize("interesting_words.txt")); fclose($file); $words_array = explode("|",$raw_string); echo $words_array[array_rand($words_array)]; Of course the real issue I had was finding a list of interesting words in the right format. Here is the list of interesting words that I used: Copy this into a file called interesting_words.txt : ubiquitous : being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent| ecdysiast : a striptease artist| eleemosynary : of, relating to, or dependent on charity| gregious : c...
Post a Comment
Read more