Mar
13
If content is one of the most important elements of a web site, links are probably the next. Most search engines now look at a websites linking patterns — both those that lead to the site and those that lead away from the site.
In the past, we have seen webmasters try to take advantage of the authority that links give a web site, many web-site owners banded together to create link-trading or reciprocal linking strategies. These are “You link to me and I’ll link to you” strategies.
For a long time, those strategies worked pretty well. You could send out an e-mail to a company and suggest that the two sites create links, each to the other’s site. By doing that both sites gained a link into their site and a link out of their site.
Then some people began taking advantage of the strategy and rather than exchanging links with other, relevant web sites, they began to exchange links with anyone who would allow it. Then those same unethical people began building dozens, hundreds, and in some cases even thousands of web sites with the specific intent of cross-linking with the one page for which they were trying to artificially raise the ranking.
And that’s when search engines began to take note. They noticed that people were manipulating link trading schemes to boost their search ranking, and some added to their guidelines that reciprocal linking and link-trading strategies were unacceptable. The result? If you use these strategies, you could be banned from the search results.
So does that mean that you can never link to a page that’s going to link back to you? No. What it means is that search engines are now paying more attention to the places that you link to. They’re looking at the sites to which you’re linking to make sure they’re relevant and have something of value to offer to users who might click through the links.
If your links do meet those requirements, you won’t be penalized for them. If they appear to be links just for the sake of linking, though, your site will be penalized and in some cases even delisted from a search engine. So if you plan to exchange links with other web sites, make sure those sites are relevant to the topic of your web site or the web page on which the link appears.
If you are trying to increase your search engine ranking by using optimization methods, i would strongly advise reading this article which explains some of the common myths and misconceptions in the SEO industry today. Top 10 SEO Myths Explained.
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I avoid reciprocal linking. Period. While it does give you incoming links, you can achieve better results through article marketing and comment marketing. Your best links use your specific keywords that you are trying to associate with that page. People who just link to your site are making you popular, but that’s about it - particularly in these days of no-follow linking. You get no pagerank out of it.The alternative to reciprocal ranking is to do this marketing as above and then check your marketing to see which websites are actually sending you traffic - and then emphasize these in your marketing.
You don’t drop other article directories, but you do make sure those who are sending you traffic get the first shot at your articles. Similarly, where you are getting traffic from comments, you prioritize these - in this way you help those you serve and get reciprocal links as result.I’d also say, in these days of social media, you’d be well off stumbling or digging your friends’ posts as a general policy. Everything you do comes back to you, afterall…
While I don’t think that link trading is a good strategy, I also don’t see anything wrong with giving a link back in a post to a blog that mentions you. Focusing on building strong work that naturally gets links is really the optimal way to drive both traffic and authority.
theregoesdave’s last blog post..ThinkGeek has your Stewie Cap
Yeah i agree with you on that one Dave. I think if you are linking elsewhere within decent content and the link is in context to what your writing about, that is a good strategy, and one i use on nearly all my blog posts.
Hope to see you around again soon.