I run a real estate blog in Boston, and have a ton of competition There's tons of real estate blogs all of a sudden in Boston I have been monitoring the competition, as our blogs are very similar --- and have noticed that the #1 thing that determines position in the SERPs is BACKLINKS Now here's the thing.... my top competitors have TONS of backlinks..... and most are reciprocal links They even have "Link Trader" pages...... even saying your site better be a PR3 or higher, all this crap I thought Google detects, frowns upon, and penalizes this type of stuff What's going on here? I feel like making a "LINKS" page and just joining the farm --- but im not going to, im going to do it the White Hat way and just build a better site and just keep building links!!!
http://www.google.com/search?q=real...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a You have some strong sites on page 1 results.
Has anyone heard of Google penalizing sites that engage in this heavy reciprocal linking? I notice my competitors link up with 100's of real estate agencies across the country.... and are @ the top of the SERP's
I got a new site to PR 3 in a couple of months by exchanging links with one PR 4 site. My site now gets a fair few hits from google searches, so reciprocal links still work.
One way to find out is throw up a link page or something and see how it goes. Long as you keep it slowly built up and dont get 50,000 new backlinks in one day, what harm can come of it? Other than google just saying "sorry they dont count" or "they dont count as much".
I am not sure if google penalize a site for reciprocal links, but they do penalize for paid links. I think one way links worth much more than reciprocal links.
Reciprocals definitely work! I had some exchanges with bass fishing guides in Florida and my SERPs took off to the 1st page for Florida Bass Fishing. In fact I'm usually #1 or #2 across datacenters in Google. I wish they were one way because they wouldn't get discounted, but because they were related I think it had a big impact. The key is also to get some of these recips on their homepage!
Reciprocal linking as a part of your overall linking strategy works great. You should still try to get some one way links from blogs, forums, directories, and of course other web sites in your niche.
Reciprocal linking does work and also best to consider is the getting along with relative sites. Sometimee even low PR backlinks but from highly relative site will give good points on ranking.
Google said: * Links intended to manipulate PageRank * Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web * Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.") * Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
guys they dont "PENALIZE" you for them, they just ignore the links they dont like. you don't know which of the links your competition has that make them rank like that. they could have 500 ignored recips, and in the middle of them somewhere 3 really potent links that give them that ranking.
Reciprocal links helps to increase SERP. But it is not good doing more reciprocal links.... Will get penalty....
As has already been said, Google likes reciprocal links, especially if you're a new site. It all depends on where your links are coming from though. Google doesn't like link farms and spammy directories because they mess with its algorithms and pagerank functions, but reciprocal links DO work and ARE important. If you look at some of the top ranking sites for key niches you'll find many of them got there from a predominantly reciprocal link based SEO strategy. To answer your question, I don't know of anyone being penalized for reciprocal link exchanges, that idea seems invalid to me. Instead perhaps what's happened is Google has penalized people for having links to/from link farms or other obviously sole-purpose sites. To get the best out of reciprocal linking you should make sure the pages you're linked from are on the same topic/niche and have around the same PR or better than yourself. You can also speed up how many reciprocal links you get using some software or best practices. Check out this article on Reciprocal Linking
I keep reading articles that reciprocal linking will get you a penalty, such as this one: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-it-...n-googles-real-estate-reciprocal-link-penalty
Dino, I think the key here is that your reciprocals are not excessive. I have probably around 20 or so recips and as I have stated they really have a positive impact for my site.