Reciprocal linking

[deano6410]

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Last week I mentioned on this forum that google appears to be adding less and less value to reciprocal links.

I also mentioned that having a large % of your overall links COULD cause penalties.

I had no solid proof to back this up, I got my info from reading many SEO forums and speaking to numerous SEO experts. A few people on here dismissed my theory, I guess this is because deep down they are worried that if it is true then they are fooked

For those of you that are familiar with the SEO scene you will be very familiar with a guy called Matt Cutts. Matt is a google engineer and basically he is the ONLY form of connection between google and us webmasters. A current problem with google is that lots of webmasters are seeing large drops in the amount of indexed pages in google. e.g used to have 30,000 pages and now 700 etc....

Many people presumed that this was just a temporary fault by google and with time it would sort itself out. HOWEVER, Matt has been discussing this on his google blog and here are some quotes:

your site seems like an example of one of those sites that might have been crawled more before because of link exchanges. I picked five at random and they were all just traded links. Google is less likely to give those links as much weight now. That’s the simple explanation for why we don’t crawl you as deeply

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

I think I’ve found your problem. I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling.

Circling back to folks who just had comments approved. Joe Hayes, it’s not that reciprocal links are automatically bad. It’s more that many reciprocal links exist for the wrong reasons. Here’s an email that I just got:

Dear Site Owner,
I am looking for quality link exchange partners for several of my
sites. I have browsed http://www.mattcutts.com and it seems like a link exchange
between our sites will benefit us both.
If you are interested in doing a link exchange between our sites, I
would be glad to hear any offer you might have.

In general I will give back a link from a page with the same PR rating
of the page I will be given.

If you own any other sites for which you are willing to trade links,
please let me know.

I’ll be glad to hear anything you have to offer.

Kind Regards
Loki

I’d recommend people spend less time on trying to gather links that way or via some automated network, and more on making a great site with a creative angle or two that makes the site stand out from the crowd.

So if we are to trust what google is telling us then it appears that having a high % of your links as reciprocal may not cause a direct penalty, HOWEVER, it looks like it will cause the following:

1) your site will be crawled less
2) The amount of pages in the google cache will dramatically decrease
3) your current link swaps will be de-valued. If you rely on these links for your current rankings then it is highly likely that your rankings will decrease.

I expect many of you to disagree with the above and I should mention once again that I dont agree 100% with this, I am simply passing on what seo experts and google are telling us.

If you have a links page, directory, resources page or partners section as a means of ranking higher in google then you may be in for hard times in the near future.

However, if you have a large amount of one-way links and have a partners section as a small boost, you should be ok.

Your thoughts?

[Wardy]

Great post deano, I always make sure I keep my eye on your posts as you seem to be very on the ball with SEO issues.

I think that it does make sence. It seems as though they are trying to weed out the "non relevant" link exchanges that are there simply to "help" with seo but hopefully the truly relevant link exchanges that do add value between sites won't get penalised.

Cheers
Wardy

[breathe]

I have heard this as well and I've heard of Matt.

It is a very interesting problem, if it was just a case of having a site with loads of irrelevant links then you get penalised by google then they have set up a system that is open to abuse.

Example I set up a site selling widgets but widgets.co.uk is number one with a good PR so I sort my site out using lessons learnt from widgets.co.uk and then I start my link building campaign with a difference. I submit widgets.co.uk to every free for all link farm that has no relevancy and damage it's brand so badly that getting to number one is easy for my widgets site I just ensure that I get relevant one way links.

It's more complex than that, have you heard of Trust Rank, now google are busy denying that it exists but I think it does. It adds an authority to the web I think it includes sites that have a legitimate PR that are trusted and links from these trusted sites are more powerful in terms of weighting than any other. Also I believe that if you have a greater number of relevant links one way, reciprocal and tri links etc and some authority linking to you, your site could be counted as an authority.

Anyhow this is just a theory and any ideas others may have on the subject I would be interested.

P.S. Google do not give any answers on how their system works

[deano6410]

I am sure that a few recips between highly relevent authority sites can only be of benefit. But personally I feel you need to look more at your overall linking %'s.

e.g which will rank higher?

a) 90% reciprocal links 10% one way
b) 40% reciprocal links 60% one way

I keep saying this but do as the authority sites do and do it naturally and you wont go far wrong.

Now if only I could follow my advice every now and then

[breathe]

I reckon it will be B

And content is king!!!!!!

[deano6410]

There are of course many issue when it comes to link building. Nobody knows for sure exactly what google is looking for, but the following are surely things you should be focusing on:

1) Links from HIGHLY relevent sites (Initially you want to give google as many clues as possible as to exactly what your site is about. By getting links from similar sites you will aid this process)

2) Links from authority sites (Many people use pagerank as a way of finding authority sites. But I have seen PR7 spam sites. If you know your industry then you SHOULD know which sites are genuine authority sites. For those of you who are familiar with TRUST RANK then this will act as an extra form of motivation for getting links from authority sites.

3) Natural linking patterns (if 99% of your links are from recips then you are in trouble. If 99% are from the same IP block then it wont be of much use. if 99% use the EXACT same anchor text then it will most likely trigger the sandbox for a long period of time. Look at any authority site and then look at their backlinks... you will see there are one ways, recips, thousands of different anchor variations, links within text, links in footers, links in headers etc.... by sticking to one method you are making your tactics un-natural to google.)

I look forward to your replies.

Dean.

[breathe]

Good post Deano6410

Page Rank is not a way to find authority sites and point 3 very well made. variations in anchor text allow google to see quite clearly that you have run a sustained link building campaign to support your site and not just spammed a bunch of poeple with do ya wanna exchage them links. or some automated bit of software etc.

[deano6410]

I dont think Google wants people to build any type of link campaign if the reason for building backlinks is to gain a higher position in the search rankings.

In an ideal world that may happen. But that is not the world we live in and google knows that people ARE going to put effort into ranking higher. By doing large link campaigns you are effectively telling google that your sites content is not good enough to get natural links.

So the key is to do a link campaign but make it appear as natural as possible.

Also I believe that Google likes you link to other relevant websites that will provide useful related information for visitors.

Correct. During the peak of the pagerank popularity there were many webmasters who used a technique known as "Pagerank hording". Basically this meant linking to no-one in the hope of getting a high page rank on as many pages as possible. Google soon stopped this and now it is best to try and link to a few genuine authorities.

[Wardy]

I question the whole 'related website' topic though. If I've got a site that is a shopping directory and sell several products (eg something similar to amazon) then what is my site related to? Other shopping sites, books sites, electrical goods sites, home & garden products sites etc.? If I add a blog to this site or a forum is my site then related to blog and forum sites? It puzzles me.

In this case why not look at linking to relevant sites from the relevant sections on your site.
Don't just stick all the book, electrical, shopping, mobile etc links on one page but create seperate relevant pages for them and link to them from the relevant section on your site.

Cheers
Wardy

[deano6410]

Wardy - Good to see a Stone Roses fan on here.

I followed Squire during his Seahorses phases and saw them live a few times.

Anyway, back ontopic.... Relevent links will most likely give your site a boost. Completely irrelevent links will have little or no effect.

It can be tricky when you have a site that has many different aspects and sections though. If in doubt follow my golden rule:

If the link will be a valuable asset to your users then consider it relevent

[CompareStore]

I have to agree with most of whats being said here. Look at it from Google's point of view - they want sites that other people believe are of value so "natural" linking will score the most brownie points.
90% (maybe 95%) of sites that have tried to build links via a linking campaign do so in the wrong way by creating a link page or directory and exchanging links with any site with any subject matter (and quite often hosting companies, gambling sites, etc.)

I have always believed the day would come when links pages and directories would be completely ignored by Google and whilst we are not there yet I think it's starting to happen.

There is effectively a sliding scale with more weight being given to those at the top:

1. Inbound links from authority sites that are related to the same subject as the site they link to
2. Inbound links from authority sites that are related to the same subject as the page (not the site) they link to
3. Inbound links from authority sites that are not related
4. Inbound links from non-authority sites that are related
5. Reciprocal links from non-authority sites that are related
6. Forget the rest!

The page where the links point to should be "proper" content pages that are part of the website and not simply links pages created for the sole purpose of exchanging links. The ratio of links to body text should be quite low too.

[deano6410]

An incoming link will never hurt your site, so why not get as many as possible from everyone and hope that some of those are the above?

I am not sure i 100% agree with that. Google would certainly like to give the impression that no other webmaster could hurt your rankings. But those experts who have studied the google sandbox know that in the early days of a site the speed in which you get links, the anchor text used and the sites that they are from are all factors of why sites go into the sandbox.

It would be very hard to effect an established site with links, but newer sites can be badly effected. I have contacts who make very nice livings from using black hat techniques and they have used many techniques to harm their competitiors rankings and in some cases they have even had competitors sites removed from the SERPS.

[BigB]

Inbound links can harm your site.

Matt Cutts specifically says that a high proportion of spammy inbound links will result in your site not being crawled fully.

That then results in existing pages dropping out of the index - and then maybe showing up as supplemental - or maybe not at all.

He also specifically says a high proportion of outbound affiliate links will have the same effect.

And also a high proportion of non-relevant outbound links. He quotes a real estate linking to a mortgage site as an example of a non-relevant outbound link! Figure that out!

Don't rely on what you would like to believe! - read it carefully:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

[freetraff]

Google talks a lot. Matt is a great guy and an experienced specialist. And for how many years they say that URLs with ID sessions will be drowned.

Check Google, they need much to do with it still (and what can be easier than finding a link with ID session).

And I have my own proofs. Even dummy site with no content on pure reciprocal link exchange got to the top. Nothing done on them for months, and they aren't still out. I don't advise to create dummy sites, they will not last for years.

Plus, how can google stop relevant link exchange? Will Google be finding the owners of web sites that in once niche exchanged the links and kill them? Who will be left on the market?

Everything must be done properly, link exchange too. If you follow some general guidelines on reciprocal link exchange - no problems.

If you grow site with irrelevant garbage, 100's of links daily - then you need a Google doctor (by the way - nice name for new Google tool).

[deano6410]

Plus, how can google stop relevant link exchange? Will Google be finding the owners of web sites that in once niche exchanged the links and kill them? Who will be left on the market?

Google knows the difference between a one way link and a reciprocal link. My 5 year old nephew can tell the difference. They are not "Killing" people who do link exchanges, but they are heavily de-valuing recip links. This means that websites that reply heavily on recip links are most likely to have problems over the coming years.

Everything must be done properly, link exchange too. If you follow some general guidelines on reciprocal link exchange - no problems.

I semi agree. If you do link exchanges with relevent, powerful sites and make sure that no more than 50% of your links are recips then you will be fine. But if you have a links page with 500 link swaps and only have 50 one way links then you are in trouble.