Apex Internet Blog

Is Reciprocal Linking Worthwhile?

There have been numerous discussions on forums, blogs and at Search Engine Conferences around the world, centred on whether reciprocal linking is still a valid Search Engine Optimisation and/or Marketing technique. Many think that reciprocal links are worthless because of the idea that reciprocal linking equals spam and that interlinking cancels out any link value. To our mind, there is no such thing as a worthless link (whether you link back or not) provided it comes from a relevant and credible source.

People often associate reciprocal linking with Link Farms only. This is a common misconception.  Link Farms are groups of websites that hyperlink to every other website in the group with the sole purpose of obtaining higher ranking in search results. The key factor is that these websites are predominantly unrelated and of low quality and don’t tend to serve much value to the end user. This type of linking is considered to be Search Engine spam.

Paid Link Schemes are another phenomenon created with purpose of manipulating Search Engine results. It is important to know that whilst not all paid links are illegitimate, many are, and that these schemes are not necessarily Link Farms but very few of them actually offer links from quality sites. Buying and selling links can negatively affect a site’s ranking in search results. Not only that, but paid Link schemes are actually a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. We advise extreme caution!

Reciprocal linking between ‘individual’ sites that have selectively exchanged links with other relevant quality sites is neither Link Farming nor Search Engine Spam. Therefore there is still value in reciprocal linking if you remember these two key things: Relevancy & Quality.

Relevancy

Google along with other Search Engines use links to determine your website’s popularity. It is Google’s (in particular) aim to provide searchers with the most relevant websites to their search query. How your site ranks in these search results is in part based on how Google sees the sites that link to yours. Simply having hundreds of inbound links from sites that are irrelevant to yours will not have a positive effect on the rankings of your site and in fact, if your site is associated with any aforementioned Link Farms or Paid Link Schemes from ‘bad neighbourhoods’, it will most likely have a detrimental effect.

In order to ensure that you receive related links back to your site, it is important to reciprocate links with sites which are of a similar or related theme to that of yours. Not only will relevancy help with your rankings, but there is the added chance of your website gaining traffic from the reciprocating site. For example if you are an accommodation site with a link on a Travel Directory, there is the possibility that users of the Directory site will visit yours from there.

Quality

The quality of the site that links to you is critical. A content rich site of a similar theme, that itself is ‘popular’ in the Search Engine indexes, will be considered of higher quality than one that has had little thought to content and has not gained in popularity via inward links. The same is true of your own site; in order to encourage inward links, the more useful content you have, the greater the chances that other website owners will find that content valuable to their users and link to it.

With that said, creating pages with content which is off topic to your site, simply to encourage links, will end up with your website receiving non relevant, low quality links and therefore will not help with your rankings.

So to answer the question Is Reciprocal Linking Worthwhile? – Yes, it is, but it must always be done with both Relevancy and Quality in mind. 

Categories: Search Engine Marketing
Posted on: 26th Jan 10 by Karyn Ogier
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