Hey all, Here is a question. I know some techy guys who say that recpr links aren't worth anything is this the case? I presume that one way links are best, as they illustrate that a site thinks there is something good about your site. However do recp links help? Or would google etc mark your site down? Help and advice greatly appreciated.
I like to go after reciprocal linking more from a human perspective. If I have a site and it provides certain content and appeals to certain people and I find another website that either a) compliments my content or even b) competes with my content I'll often contact the webmaster to see if we can help each other out. In terms of human traffic it makes complete sense to get links on sites that compliment yours - people are going to love your site and be receptive to your sales links. Also building relationships with other webmasters is always a smart thing to do because you can explore crosspromotions in each other's newsletters, guest blogging in each other's blogs, offering free reports to the other person's visitors, and other marketing methods that benefit both of you. Does Google care about this? I don't know. As long as I'm increasing my targetted traffic and sales I don't worry about it. But then I don't link swap with hundreds of sites, either - I just go after sites that have some quality to them. Dan
NO, Asolutely Not!!! __________________________________________________________________________________________ From an SEO stand point... Reciprocal links do occur naturally and therefore Google will not punish you for it, in fact they expect to see a certain amount of it, because as I mentioned, it is natural. However, it is NOT natural for all of your links (or a large percentage) to be reciprocal, and if that is the case, you may face Google's Wrath. Also keep in mind that relevancy plays an important role in any link development campaigns, if you have a website about Dinasours, you don't want to be linking to, or aquiring links from websites about Underwear I personally think that reciprocal links should only account for about 5% (or less) of the total in-Bound links.
I also write guest posts for bloggers in the PF niche to get some links and spread the word on my site.
It would help only if it's not a straight recip link. Meaning Site 1 Page 1 links to Site 2 Page 1 and Site 2 Page 1 links to Site 1 Page 1. That would be a worthless link exchange. Now if the they link to each other but using differing pages and the pages are related to teach other (same category, same niche, a debate, or authority pages) this would yield some value.
Agreed, if a majority of your inbound links are reciprocal, then Google will devalue them. However, if they occur naturally (as they will), then they will not harm you. However, you want the majority of your links to be one-way inbound links.
So would you think that its best for a site to link to a certain page on a site instead of the generic Index page?
Do you mean, you give bloggers content in exchange for links? Does this work, do bloggers go for this?
search engines generally try to find 'naturalness' in their analyses. So yes, while 'real' sites do tend to have a lot of links back to their indexes, they also have links to subpages, because that's what 'real' people do when they add a link to their blog or site. In other words, if it looks natural, it will probably be treated as natural.
Reciprocal links are good for bringing in targetted traffic - for example you can set up a relationship with another website similar to yours and that's great for traffic
Any link coming into your site is valuable. Some are just more valuable than others. I have many sites that only have reciprocal links and they're PR 2 and 3 sites. But as it was stated above, it's best if you have different types of links coming into your site with a variety of anchor text. Don't be afraid of recip links, they valuable. TxDon
great advice guys n gals. So to summarise all links are good some are better than others, and links to different pages on the sites help. And then tommorow Google will change its mind!