I see allot of talk recently about reciprocal links and Google de-valuing them or not even counting them at all. Is this theory or 100% fact? In my niche lots of the main players still exchange links and rank well, so who's right ? In my case i have been swapping links with just about everyone who's "worth" linking to in my niche. On manual review by anyone over at the Plex they would see that my links pages are pointing to all sites that are 100% on topic and very relevant, in return these link back to my domain. Those pages are useful to the visitor, if they cant find what they are looking for on my site then those pages are an option to look else where. So wheres the problem? Is it a waste of time? Am i hurting my domain by doing this? After Update Jagger im ready to nuke them pages but I'm not sure just yet. What are your thoughts and do you still swap links and rank well ?
Nobody has provided any evidence to support it. Just another wildly speculative theory for the current on-going google changes.
Reciprocals will *never* get devalued. Plus, they are perfectly natural links. The only problem is sites relying solely on link swaps. In order to vote via links you have to have voting power The real value is when X number of sites have a lot of non-recip links and swap among them. Just making sites and interlinking them has almost no values because these are sites without voting powah
I have a site that has like 99% reciprocal links. It was a PR5, it went to a Pr1 this around. Its not conclusive, of course (some sites linking to it may have dropped Pr or whatever), but its interesting, at the very least.
The Google Webmaster guidelines still advise you to get links to your site. Besides, Google is not the only search engine out there! MSN and Yahoo also measure popularity in terms of link to some lesser or greater degree, so reciprocal linking with on theme, good related sites should not be dead. So in my opinion, if you believe that your site visitors could benefit from the links you are providing - keep going. They keep telling us - build a site for humans and the search engines will come!
On topic links and using reciprocals in a mix of linking strategies is probably a safe way to invest your time.
LOL, indeed. We have no way of knowing for sure what Google does but the facts are clear: 1. Google was using links to decide value 2. Webmasters started exchanging links on a massive scale 3. Link exchanging skews the erstwhile PageRank way of determining relevance. From there it is not difficult to conclude that Google is not particularly excited by reciprocals. Further, they have commented in their webmaster guidelines - and, more directly, via the Matt Cutts' blog - that they don't like it. If they don't like it you can reasonably conclude it's not worth going after reciprocals. If they're not already discounting them ... they could in the near future. They could go one step further and actually penalise reciprocals. It's your call as much as it's mine as to whether they ever really do it.
It isn't reciprocal linking Google doesn't like. It's the buying and selling of reciprocal linking. That's one of the reasons I think that relevancy of links is going to be increasingly important. That may not stamp out PR selling entirely but it will reduce it. If a link needs to be relevant to your page, the necessity for purchasing a link is reduced.
Not quite true. Would of been true if links generated voting power, but they simply spread voting power (only the size of the web generates voting power). As I said earlier, low-quality pages may swap links as much as they want, but they have no voting power. Some time ago, low quality swaps would of still been very helpful, because they would have increased the Information Retrieval Score (anchor text keywords give a lot of keyword relevance/specificity). But since Google combined PageRank and the IR Score of every link (instead of calculating them separately for all links and finally combining them as they did in Google's prototype), that naturally lowers the importance of low-quality link swaps (the low-quality link spread little pagerank and that results in little anchor text (IR) voting). But, swaps between pages with high PageRank is very valuable. These links pass a lot of pagerank combined with the right keywords and are valueable. Some of the most valuable link swaps are keyword rich home page swaps.
Yes and no. It is the senseless link trading Google doesn't like. Google doesn't like anything that is being done for the sole purpose of increasing search engine rankings. If you have link exchange that makes sense, you may benefit from it ranking wise. There is nothing wrong with trading links and having your friends' sites and recommended businesses on a resource page and have them link back to you as well. What the problem is when it's being overdone and things stop making sense. Many people here are in danger of that and sometimes it's better to slow down and wait for the right sites to come along and trade resources with. Mike
How is "yes and no" related to whatever you said in the rest of your post? I said, "It isn't reciprocal linking Google doesn't like". Did you think you were saying anything different?
They have no way of determining reciprocal linking as it was historical done from the reciprocal linking done purely to influence their algo. Except by applying a relevancy filter. It's unlikely that my Chitika focused visitors are actively looking for mesothelioma lawyers and hard disk recovery services. Given their semantics capabilities it's not impossible for Google to weed out irrelevant links/devalue sites with a large number of them.
SEO-guy.com does almost entirely all reciprocal link campaigns for their clients. If you're really curious how they're affecting Google, I would bounce some questions of Morgan and his team at their forum. But I'll save you a trip...its not hurting rankings at ALL.
I totally agree - It is not hurting. We have about 15,000+ link partners (3-way) to all the sites we run. Age of link is what has been rewarded. About 9-12+ before a-text gets counted 100%
When investing time and money into something it's safer to invest in that which is less likely to be a target.
Yeah but how do the distinguish the relevancy of a Meso lawyer on a family and home site that might dispense information on a broad variety of subjects. The link could certainly be relevant and should not be discounted in such a case. And how about a site about office management. Again for a small office, having information on hard disk recovery services could actually be useful and relevant. I think any widespread relevancy filter for links is just going to make things worse, not better. The problem you end up with is the SEO's and such will just have very narrow relevant links and the real websites will have real links and the index will suck.