23 replies to this topic

[mitash]

Hi,

Everyone seems to be concentrating on one way link building...

Can industry specific reciprocal link building with use of proper Anchor text still do good for a website...?

Cheers..

[ewc21]

I think so, provided each link is relevant to the other's web page. I can't exchange links with a detergent soap web site if mine is all about antique furniture....

[mitash]

Yeap, I am talking about industry specific websites/pages...

Furniture website gets links from all furniture related websites...

[Scottie]

Of course they help! The engines don't penalize for reciprocal links.

This might be of interest to you:

Mutual Linking Vs Reciprocal Linking

[chrishirst]

I can't exchange links with a detergent soap web site if mine is all about antique furniture....

Why not ???

[torka]

Not that they'd exchange, but this would potentially be an excellent soap link for an antique furniture site:

Murphy Oil Soap



(And, yes, I know you were using that as an example, not saying that you actually have a furniture site. The point is: think outside the box when it comes to linking. Just because your site is "about" a particular topic, that doesn't mean all the sites you exchange links with have to be "about" that identical topic... in fact, it might be better if they weren't, because those that are about the exact same topic are likely your competitors... Scottie's article, linked above, is an excellent resource to help get started thinking about what really would make a useful link partner. )

--Torka

[Michael Martinez]

Very well said, Torka. Very well said, indeed.

[St0n3y]

There is a difference between helping, not helping, and being penalized. Scottie, can you clarify what you meant by they help and not being penalized. There is a huge anti-reciprocal link movement starting up because they "don't help.". I'm doing my own testing on this but so far I'm not convinced that reciprocal links are worthless when it comes to SE weight.

[Michael Martinez]

There is a difference between helping, not helping, and being penalized. Scottie, can you clarify what you meant by they help and not being penalized. There is a huge anti-reciprocal link movement starting up because they "don't help.". I'm doing my own testing on this but so far I'm not convinced that reciprocal links are worthless when it comes to SE weight.

As far as I have seen, the backlash has focused on automated reciprocal linking, and the link management services have not taken the beating lightly. They've struck back in more than one forum on more than one occasion.

What people need to be careful about is to avoid lumping all types reciprocation together. Even automated reciprocal links are not all alike.

That said, as widely practiced today, reciprocal linkage can be described as relatively ineffective for search rankings based on linkage in that it levels the playing field. But reciprocal linkage also improves crawling opportunities for new sites that get links from older sites which are crawled regularly.

Where reciprocal linking used to be most effective was when dissimilar sites (from distinct verticals) linked to each other. This kind of "cheap" reciprocation helped to boost link popularity for sites that didn't exchange links with their competitors. But many people criticized the practice and most people today advocate exchanging links with similar or "relevant" sites to provide some value to visitors.

The real problem with relevance, however, is that it's largely a subjective area. What you think is relevant to your site may seem irrelevant to me, and vice versa.

In the meantime, if you only rely upon relevant reciprocation, you deny yourself the opportunity to earn traffic from other sites that may be willing to exchange links with you. Some reciprocal links can still be pretty effective in generating viable traffic, even if they don't seem to help with search engines.

Where I see conservative SEOs going these days is to advise people to seek out useful, beneficial links regardless of whether those links may help with search engine rankings. Rankings are not based solely on linkage anyway, and since we cannot determine in advance which links will help, agonizing over who is best to reciprocate with diminishes the reward of link-building.

Finally, there are people like me who, having been inundated with fluff reciprocal link requests through the years, are sick of the whole process. I abandoned link reciprocation years ago because my email was just flooded with requests from sites that were obviously just selling affiliate merchandise or carrying PPC ads.

While everyone is free to create that kind of junk content in the hopes of becoming the next hot Net Millionaire, I'm under no obligation to help you achieve your goal by linking to your pages. They provide no benefit or value to me or my visitors. And many other Webmasters now share my antipathy toward the massive onslought of reciprocal link requests.

The process has become abusive through sheer weight of numbers.

[Scottie]

Reciprocal linking through software and services often leaves a "footprint". I wouldn't touch that with a 10-ft-pole. Why? Easy to spot those "networks".

If someone with a related site writes to you and asks to trade links, and you review the site and it is something you would like to link to (for whatever reason!) then trade links.

Any automated approach to "reciprocal link building" is something I would be very wary of doing. Reciprocating links to every site that sends you a link request just because "it's another link" just doesn't make much sense. No matter how you organize your links, it's pretty obvious that they have no use on your site other than inflating your link pop.

Not to mention the fact that many of these "link trade" pages have soooo many links on them, the value you get from a low importance page divided by 150 links is almost nothing.

[ewc21]

Why not ???

If my site does not discuss anything about soap...

Torka, I guess I have a pretty lame example to show. Thanks for the link.

[Jill]

If my site does not discuss anything about soap...

That's the thing, it doesn't need to.

If all you think you can do is trade links with others who sell soap, you're gonna have a pretty difficult time with any kind of linking.

People who buy furniture also buy soap, no?

[projectphp]

Also, some people are just partners, or people you plain want to link to.

Often, your brother has a gig on soon (go on, give him a link you stingey SOB), or your sister has a business or your local club has a charity or fund raiser or, whatever. No one can tell you who to link to, and the less you think about SEo when linking, and the more you think about people who feel compelled to link (lets say supliers, family, friends etc), the more links you will natuarlly find.

[mitash]

Scottie thanks for the article its great...

Has any one done any testing or has any examples to see how much reciprocal link building helps improve the ranking in search engines...

[ChipJohns]

There are so many factors that are involved with links.

Presuming that everything else is equal (which it never is) a link to my site from site A doesn't necessarily have the same weight as a link to your site from site A. If site A has linked to your site for three years and to mine for 3 months, Google may consider the links as having different values. Many other factors are invovled as well like the descriptive text used in the link, etc., etc.

Again, there are so many factors that are involved with links that one can easily get lost in semantics.

Create a site that people want to link to. Link to sites whom your site visitors will find helpful. Link to other sites that you just want to link to (as long as they are not from bad neighborhoods.)

My take is if I have to work that hard at link building to get a site to the top of the serps, then competition is too steep and even if I get to the top of the serps, this usually isn’t enough, and the roi just wasn't worth it. (Create great content and let linking happen naturally, help it along sure but don’t get to the point where you are so wrapped up in a link campaign that you lose site of everything else.) I would much rather spend time researching keyword phrases and rank for more specific phrases that will bring better traffic with less competition.