Some of you know my www.blazemp.com site. Another one of my ventures is www.excessively.net. Now I have had a link on excessively.net to blazemp.com since it started. However, I am working hard to get excessively.net ranking better. So, I thought about putting a link on blazemp.com to excessively.net. There has been a lot of talk back and forth about reciprocal links being devalued, etc. What do most of you think on this? Do you think it would be a good idea? I was thinking to put it here: www.blazemp.com/downloads.html I went ahead and put it in place just for now so you could see what I had in mind. If they would be devalued, it would seem better to keep the one off blazemp.com since it would be better to have one solid link than two links of little to no value. On the other hand, if there is benefit, it would certainly be helpful to have a link from blazemp.com since it should be a strong link. Thanks in advance.
Here's what I think. First off, you're right in that reciprocal backlinks carry lower weight than one-way links, but they are by no means totally devalued. Even in Google -- and Yahoo! and MSN still love them. So the benefits are still there. This is the essence of the Web we're talking about. It's perfectly natural for two Websites to link to each other if their owners simply like each other's content. It's also about how natural it looks to SEs. If your link appeared on a link farm-style page with auto-generated content, that would not be too good. But if you place it on a high-quality site like yours, it'll be perfectly OK. (BTW, kudos on your sites, I really liked them both. Very professional.) Looks good to me. There are few links on this page, which is good. And the description is hand-crafted, which provides good context for your link. Also, think about traffic benefits. blazemp.com contains many links, and most of them appear to be audio/video-related. I'd say a link to excessively.net would look a bit out of place there. So I'd keep things as they are now. Just my thoughts, Warkot
Yes. But firstly, the pros will outweigh the cons in this case. It's just one link, with a good description, and from a damn good page, with a high PR. Given the thoroughness with which mystikmedia approaches his linking strategy (thinking about every link), it's not like he's gonna rush into creating a link farm, right? Secondly, it's simply good marketing. More exposure, more traffic. While we're all optimizing for Google here, I'm still of the opinion you should market whatever it is you're selling as if Google did not exist. Kinda schizophrenic, I know And I'll never believe Google will really frown on the Webmaster in this specific case because of the link. The sites are damn good, the link benefits are worth it. Even if it's a topically unrelated reciprocal. That said, I'm all for theme-related link building. I do it all the time. But rules are to be broken every once in a long while Warkot
I don't think it would hurt any of the sites by placing that link in the downloads page (of course only Google knows the answer) . One thing that I might have done differently is use Excessively.net as the title (without hyperlinking it) and link to the site with my anchor text from within the description. Most flash games sites links tend to be in the sidebar in the form of a series of links, so I believe that it might be beneficial if you could get a few links within text. It might give you an advantage over the competing sites. Of course this is just an opinion, flash games is a niche that I never pursued and I can't say that I know much (if anything) about it.