6 replies to this topic

[Ignoramus]

OK - first post and I'm not an SEO/SEM pro' so, as they say, be gentle with me please.

Leaving aside the argument about their value, we get lots of requests for reciprocal links. These are usually from link campaigners acting for sites which are at least vaguely relevant to our business.

The emails all start the same way..

"I have visited your site..blah blah..Reciprocal linking is a good thing.. blah blah..We've already posted your link here.. Ourdomain/Link Directory/Category A/Subcategory B/Page X etc. Please return a link to.. " (inevitably, their home page).

So far so good - and when you visit the link given in the email, there is our site and description.

Here's the catch...

When you visit their home page there is no link to their 'links directory'. Nor can a link to the directory be found on any other page including the site map. I'm assuming that neither visitor nor bot can find it.

Are they, in effect, trying to get a 'one way link' ? Good for them - no value to us.

Is this a bit cheeky ? I'm assuming these people know what they are doing. Or am I missing something, being knarled and cynical, or out to lunch. Any comments will be appreciated.

[qwerty]

Seems you're not much of an ignoramus after all, Ignoramus.

It's not uncommon for people to offer a "reciprocal" link and then not reciprocate at all, either by removing the link to you after you've linked to them, running the link through a script that a search engine spider can't follow, or by doing just what you're describing.

That particular method is a touch less crafty, since anybody can link to that page in order to get the search engines to take note of it, whether the site owner has orphaned it or not.

But it doesn't matter. Even if these sites really are vaguely relevant to your business, they're most likely not worth your attention. As you pointed out, the emails all begin the same way. That's because they're boilerplate text sent out to probably thousands of sites based on some search they scraped the results of. They probably haven't even looked at your site. And that's because they're not interested in linking out to sites they're proud to recommend to their readers. They're just trying to get as many links as they can, from any site, under any circumstances, just to increase the sheer number of backlinks for their site, and that strategy is one that only a real ignoramus would use nowadays.

[Rod]

Even if you did find the link directory page, you would probably find 100's of outgoing links on it. The pagerank is so diluted on these pages that the value to your own site is questionable at best.

[Randy]

Welcome Iggy !

Now you know why my spam filters catch and automatically delete such emails.

[Ignoramus]

Thank you for your replies. I suspected as much.

Think I'll just go and check that the inbound links I thought we had still exist....

[Christopher]

So the passed PR from pages with many links is less then a page with 1 link... ?

[Randy]

That's the general theory that was put forward in the original PageRank documentation Christopher. And it still makes sense.

Thinking about it in over simplistic, non-PR values, let's say a page had been assigned a value of 20 points which it could pass along to other pages. If this page contained links to 20 other pages, and if we assumed that the point value was devided equally between the links, each of these other pages would be assigned 1 point. Whereas if there were only 10 links each could transfer a maximum of 2 points each.

This is not to say that you should only link to one page from any other page, because there's a lot more that goes into linking relationships. Following such a one link per page strategy would be quite detrimental in real life. But the number of links on a page does have some bearing on the amount of link popularity that can be passed, because it can never transfer more than it has to pass along.