Hi Everyone, I have a question about reciprocal link exchanges and how ones link page should be structured for SEO. I have been optimizing a site for about 9 months now and still cannot seem to get out of googles filter. A few days ago I read a blog post explaining how reciprocal links are old seo techniques and the best ones are one-way. It also said it is a big mistake to have a links.html page on your site with "Link Page" in the title, example: "links.htm page filter: This filter penalizes a sites ranking determined by the use of a links.html page. Using reciprocal linking is a old technique that is not promoted by Google anymore. This filter effects your ranking in the serps." Well this is exactly how my site is structured and is the only flaw I can find on my site? My questions is: If I delete my whole links page including the links in it (I have done quite a few reciprocal link exchanges) and create a whole different Links page (including the URL structure will change from links.html to buddies.html) will this be worse or better and will I get penalized for doing this? I will add the existing links I had in there again but they will be structured in different URLS and I will organize them in categories, example health sites, sports sites, News sites, shopping resources....... Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your help.....
I don't think you would necessarily get punished for having a file called links.htm. Some very reputable websites may want to use this filename for something other than a reciprocal link directory. I recently had the PR taken away from my resources.php page. So they are trying to cut down on the benefits of link exchanges, but I don't think that is the cause of your lack of Google rankings. More likely you are linking to too many unrelated websites and maybe even some shady neighborhoods or link farms. Try going through your links and seeing which ones are actually quality websites. I would be willing to bet that at least some of those websites have been banned from Google and have had their PR taken away.
Can you post your url? I'd be inclined to delete the links page altogether but hard to say without seeing the site.
Deleting the links page may be tempting to try to gain trust with the search engines. I'd be careful about that though. If link exchanges are your primary marketing method this could have adverse effects. By doing that you would piss off all of your link partners and most of them would remove your link once they realize that you've taken their link down. This could lower the rankings that you may have on other search engines.
I have useful links page where I put the links which comes out from submitting my site to web directories and want to know what would be better for our site ....... Please feel free all ro advise us..
I am never a great fan of reciprocal links and many a times I feels whether they are even worth of the effort! Anyway if you are so keep in keeping your reciprocal links (I am not sure they are even helping you afterall 9 months is a big time period and you havent' seen any results) you can change it do buddies.html, no problem with that. Instead of deleting things, better block them through robots.txt and ask for deindexing that page from google webmasters tool. But really, dont' waste too much time in reciprocals is my honest advice
IF you change the page's name, you will also break the "link verification". If you also run a "link verification check" on links to your site, you will find many of them no longer exist. With this said, those links really will not help you. Just ditch them. The best way we have found to do this is to use the robots.txt file and then use Webmaster Tool's Remove URL to remove the pages. This is fast, clean and what Google likes. Then fill in you DP sigs links and in a week, you will be better off.
Thanks for the advise everyone, I am going to go ahead use the robots.txt file and then use Webmaster Tool's Remove URL to remove the pages. One more question: 1) Most of you that have responded are against reciprocal links? I know one-way links are the answer but how does a site that is barley starting out gets links? The only thing a site owner can offer in order to get a link on someone elses relative site is an exchange? I know we can submit to directories and post in relatives forums but what are other ways to get good quality inbound links without have to reciprocate? Oh an link buying is another risky issue, if google catches you BAMMMM penalty!!!!!!!! Thanks for all your help....
You buy them. If you buy the links in-content in relevant sites, there is absolutely no way that anyone can tell they are bought links.