www.smeketing.com » Uncategorized http://www.smeketing.com Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:21:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO? http://www.smeketing.com/reciprocal-linking-good-or-bad-seo/ http://www.smeketing.com/reciprocal-linking-good-or-bad-seo/#comments Wed, 11 May 2011 10:05:11 +0000 SMEketing http://www.SMEketing.com/?p=2419 ]]> If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on.

So it could be tempting to respond positively to an email like this:

Dear site owner,

I have just gone through your site, and visited many pages. I have noticed that you have good content on the site. It would be better if we link to each other as reciprocal link place an important role in a search engine ranking algorithm.

I would appreciate if you placed a link back to my site:

DETAILS:

Title – SEO Company India

URL – http://www.example.com

Description – example.com is one of the leading SEO Company in India offers top SEO services for guaranteed search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I will add your link here – http://www.example.com/Resources

Wishing you every success in business!

Please do not respond to these kind of emails!

Link building does play an “important role in a search engine ranking algorithm” but this kind of reciprocal linking will likely do you more harm than good. Take a look at this article from Google Webmaster, “Link schemes“. They list examples of link schemes that they say “can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”:

Examples of link schemes can include:

  • Links intended to manipulate PageRank
  • Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
  • Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
  • Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Links from one site to another are like votes – one website endorsing another. If both websites are linking to each other, in a way it cancels out this ‘vote’. That’s not to say that all reciprocal links are bad – if the BBC wrote an article about you or your business and included a link, you’d most likely want to promote the good piece of PR by linking directly to that article on the BBC website.

However, Google is able to identify where links are coming from – are they from high quality sites with the occasional reciprocal link (like the BBC example, in which case you linking back to them is no bad thing) or are the majority of your links reciprocal links, coming from spammy sites on pages with hundred of other links all pointing to unrelated sites?

Link building is something that takes time and effort. You can’t cheat the system or make any large quick wins. SEO is a long term strategy and isn’t something that happens overnight. Planning a high quality campaign which includes the gathering of high quality inbound links is something that all businesses should be doing.

If you want to know more about link building, you may find these article helpful:

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