On the tips section of this site in the SEO part rule 3 says "Do not use link exchanges, sign guestbooks with links, etc. While it doesn't penalize you (since you can't control what other websites have), it does not help you at all." Isn't saying that reciprocal links do not help at all pretty extreme? I can't imagine what would happen if I had no reciprocal links for my main site. At least I don't want to imagine...
I don't think BLs can hurt you as you cannot control who links to you but outbound links can hurt if your not careful who your linking to.
This thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17033 says IB links can hurt. Who it right? I am trying to figure this out. So far I have stayed away from link programs, but I am not sure if I should.
I think you can miss the whole point of SEO if you're not careful; the reason for wanting to rank high in search engines is to get more relevant traffic. Good relevant links, even if they are reciprocal, can generate a large proportion of your sites traffic.
Yeah, but SEO is what you do on "YOUR" site. What you do outside the site is marketing. SEO is not a catch all pharse. Marketing makes you money. SEO is just making sure when your marketing pays off, the proper message is being seen. These two points need to be seperated and most will see just how easy this game is to undestand. Get organzied and remove the mystery of the buzz word. High School Communcations 101 teaches how to write the copy. If you can edit an HTML file, the tips you need to apply the copy are published everywhere.
I don't know about this. I think most of us talk about onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Incoming links would be the offsite SEO. And in my experience, reciprocal links help sites rank better.
I have never found myself penalized for recip links. I even tried an experiment and only reciped with Casinio and Pharm sites on one of my directory sites. The links page for some odd reason (even though all the recips were pointing at the index) had a higher PR than any other page. Thats not to say I don't think their is such a thing as bad neighborhoods but I think where Google draws the line is a lot different than people think. I also believe a related one way is worth more but if you have an overall balance, recips can still help.
Hmmm very interesting.....May be a risk but at least these sites do normally get to be page 1 for weired searches etc... May be I should think about for one of my sites, which at the moment I don't do any back linking. Also, once you started with those sites did your inbox fill up with spam and your site get hit by spam bots adding sites auto? Ian
My inbox is always full because of my aggresive link building campaigns so a few more hardly go noticed. I run all my mails through one gMail account so it only take a few minutes a day to get rid of the SPAM. By the way, I was amazed I got any benefit out of the links myself. I wouldn't suggest it if your reputation is your primary focus but for Directory sites, etc, it seems to not be as much of an issue as is commonly floated. In SEO I believe that there are a lot of wives tales that get spread just because you have heard them a million times. I suggest do your own experiments on a new domain and judge these theories for yourself. With GoDaddy so cheap, its well worth the $3 a month to get your own data.
Interesting info on recips. I have always been weary of who I link to so I have been hesitant on doing recips. If the recipt is to a good site that is indexed then I don't see why it would be bad.
I think, unless you have a site where it is relevant to just about anyone (eg a directory), you should probably try to keep recip links relevant to your site. If nothing else, the traffic quality should be better.
I keep things fairly relevant, but I don't worry too much about traffic. Some sites have it and some don't but I don't try to figure out which are which before swapping links. Also when I think relevance I don't think the same surfers. I ahve an English learning sites and I trade links with translation sites. Now someone looking for translation is unlikely to be looking to spend a ton of time learning English, but it doesn't matter much to me. I end up with a roughly 50/50 split at least on my main site. This month I've had 26,000 visits from other sites and 28,000 from search engines. Without reciprocal linking I'm fairly certain those numbers would be much much lower.