Reciprocal Links

Incoming links and their level of ‘quality’ and ‘impact’ have become on of the most important ranking ‘signals’ for major search engines such as Google. What started as simply the way the ‘Web’ structure could work i.e. hyperlinks between pages, naturally developed into one of the earliest social networking activities on the Web – swapping links. Another aspect of the early use of links on the Web that has found its way right through to the Web of today is the idea that we may include an individual links page on our website that for some reason our website visitors may want to look at. Some websites will even label it as being ‘resources’ or even ‘useful links’. The fact is that these pages are so rarely useful to website visitors but are really just a place where our outgoing links are put because:

• It’s easy
• Everybody else seems to be doing it
• They don’t seem to fit anywhere else
• They may not be that relevant to the other sections of our website
• They allow us to easily take part in reciprocal linking without having to give them any prominence on our important pages.

What Is Reciprocal Linking?

This is the swapping of links – “I’ll link to you if you link to me”. Often the dinosaur ‘links page’ is intrinsically linked with this activity, and this is one of the main reasons why reciprocal linking has attracted bad press and largely uncorroborated negative reports from SEO people and Web companies that the actual activity of reciprocal linking:

• Doesn’t work….?
• Search Engines Don’t Like It…?
• It could harm your rankings…?

Why Links Pages May Be Partly To Blame

The use of links pages may be partly to blame for the negative assumptions about reciprocal linking itself. The reasons for this closely tied to the way that ‘links’ pages seem to conform to the opposite of the 4 basic characteristics of a high quality link according to Google. For example:

One: A link should come from a page where the ‘context’ is good – the subject matter of the page linking to yours should relate strongly to the page in your website it’s linking to.

Links pages generally contain links dealing with a wide variety of different subjects. Also these pages contain little other text content other than the links themselves. Therefore as far as Google is concerned a lack of content and no clear category or subject = bad context and perhaps even a low quality page.

Two: A link should come from a page with a Good PageRank™

Partly because of the reasons mentioned in point one, links pages aren’t really places that people naturally want to visit or link to. This will therefore make them unlikely to have higher PageRank™s.

Three: An incoming link to your page should include a key phrase in the ‘anchor text’ that is highly relevant to the subject matter of the page it’s linking to.

Where a casual reciprocal linking agreement is made it’s often different to control or impose conditions on exactly how the link will appear on the other person’s page. This being so it’s often the case that much of the link value is lost by a link being made which is simply your domain name of a phrase like ‘click here’.

Four: An incoming link should come from a page which has as few other links on it as possible.

By its very nature a links page is just that – a page made up of lots of links – sometimes an awful lot of links.

Link ‘Impact’ and Reciprocal Linking

As well as ‘importance’ we’re told that our incoming links should have ‘impact’. Higher impact links can come from authoritative, older and more established pages which already have plenty of high quality links, and could already be providing good incoming links to competitor web pages. Links from universities, local government, and libraries have long been valued for their instant authoritative clout.

It may well be the case that the biggest participators in reciprocal linking however are smaller businesses who haven’t the time to worry about where links are coming from, but have just been told to get some incoming links. There are a number of relevant points related to this including:

• These types of pages are unlikely to be able to attract or get high impact links – why should other pages e.g. high impact ones link to a small business web page?
• Armed with little knowledge about the potential negative side of some links, webmasters of these websites may be inclined to get links any way they can. This could lead to incoming links which at least may not help, and at most could damage the reputation of their web pages e.g. paid for links from link farms or link schemes (which search engines tend not to like), links from pages which are associated with spam activity or bad neighbourhoods, links which lack good context (in subject matter), and links from many risky non English speaking web pages.

Other Mitigating SEO Talk

1. PageRank™ ‘weight’ or ‘juice’ can be passed from one page to another. Getting a link from a page that Google by its own admission (algorithmically speaking) is really important can pass some of that importance to you.
2. Manipulating PageRank™ can be bad for your web pages – search engines don’t like it.
3. The popular assumption that the positive effect of links into a page can be cancelled out exactly by having the same number of links going out of that page – rather like pouring water into a bucket with holes in the bottom.

The Google Link Home Truth

In Google for example all links (unless for example the ‘human’ Web Spam Team of the search engine have cause to look at them for some reason) are treated the same way. Your website architecture (internal linking) and your incoming links are judged against the automatic system of algorithms. You are basically up against the link algorithm and (which is subject to regular change).

BUT….

1. The ranking of a web page is a balance of how over 200 or so different ranking signals stack up against a variety of algorithms.
2. The internal PageRank™ figure at Google is much larger, higher, and more finely grained figure than the simple 0 to 10 truncated figure that we see.

SO….

Reciprocal links are very unlikely to just simply cancel eachother out. You may get some value out of the deal. Over time, the positive effects of reciprocal links could add up for you – reciprocal links are not inherently bad.

You may therefore have more chance of getting value from a reciprocal link arrangement so long as:

1. You make sure the link you get conforms to as many aspects of what makes a high quality incoming link as possible.
2. You don’t rely just on linking to and from a links page, but you make sure you get links to many pages within your website.
3. You produce high quality content and genuinely write with your target market’s needs in mind, and with the will give them real value. This may help to attract better reciprocal linking.