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The Good and
Bad News About Reciprocal Link Exchanges
Search Engine Optimization
By: Stephen S Alison
Reciprocal linking is a topic that generates a lot of
discussion: everyone wants to know how to get it to work for
them. Much of this discussion involves link trading, or linking
together their own websites, and whether it’s going to get you
in trouble or not.
They invariably fear that they will run into problems with
search engines who may consider it cheating. Many of them have
heard horror stories about Linking Farms which often get banned
from Google along with every page associated with them. This
fear is justified by the obvious disasters that link farms can
ensue upon a web site. There are very few webmasters who are
willing to take the risk and rightfully so
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Misunderstandings cloud the debate on reciprocal links on both
sides. Reciprocal links deserve a fair hearing, because some are
bad for a website, but most aren’t. In the beginning, almost all
sites had plenty of reciprocal links (the tradition of the
‘links’ page), and they worked exactly as intended. Links
brought in additional traffic, and affiliate links let people
make money.
These ‘links’ pages are less and less common now, but seem to be
making a slight come back during this period in which SEO work
has become a phenomena and a hobby for many web masters. The
fact that SEO work is so common now will inherently lead to
answers to questions which have been guarded for years. These
answers will help people decide if the old fashioned ‘links’
pages are worth having or not. |
Most people see nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned link
trading, but swapping links is only one aspect of reciprocal
linking. These link swaps are allowed and, in many cases,
considered beneficial. Link trades are great for web sites
because they allow them to communicate a greater amount of
information to their visitors. These link swaps are only
beneficial, however, if they link to pages that are somehow
relevant. Links to completely random pages that visitors will
not find interesting are useless and could be considered
fraudulent exchanges.
There are also automatic link exchanges on the good side of
things, and link farms on the bad one. Link exchanges can be
extremely beneficial, but before you allow yourself to get roped
into this kind of situation, make sure that it pans out as a
legitimate source of traffic. If you subscribe to a link
exchange, the links should be hand made by you. They should not
be kept in a gigantic database on the middle man’s server. They
should also be done upon request rather than automatically. You
should be able to look through each link and view each page to
insure quality.
Reciprocal links are popular because of the good things they
give you: they act as ads for your site as well as increasing
your search engine rankings. Some people, however, say that you
shouldn’t link to other websites as it decreases your own link
popularity – they don’t realize that you need to give a little
to get a little.
Third Party Link Sites - These sites allow anyone to
join, like a club – but they don’t usually work to your
advantage. They say they’re going to make it easier to find
sites that will exchange links with you, but in reality you
often won’t get the kind of link quality you were expecting.
It’s a bad idea to use one of these ‘link agencies’, as many of
them lack basic linking knowledge and have no idea of the best
link strategies.
There are some rules that you should follow when you agree to
link to another site, and some rules that you should expect the
other sites to follow. Many webmasters don’t know how to trade
links effectively – you need to teach them. There’s a right way
and a wrong way to manage links – always remember that quality
is more important than quantity. FFAs with hundreds or thousands
of links are completely useless, and no search engine wants them
in their index. Many have been banned from the search engines.
The abuse of linking going on today is proof of the ignorance
that surrounds link trading – just look at an FFA if you don’t
believe me. Trading links has been going on since the beginning
of the web, but all it would take for it to lose its popularity
is for the search engines to start paying less attention to it,
as they will soon be forced to do.
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