Is the Reciprocal Link Dying a Slow Death? - The Evolution of Reciprocal Linking
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As the search engine optimization industry grew and developed, reciprocal linking became a powerful and widely accepted technique for acquiring backlinks, and therefore, improving search engine ranking positions (SERPs) for target search terms. Various software applications were developed to create and manage reciprocal links. Many websites began to build reciprocal link directories that would store scores of different reciprocal links. The industry leader in reciprocal link management is Linksmanager.com. They offer a fully automated and comprehensive system for acquiring, managing, and hosting reciprocal links.
Unfortunately, one of the undesirable byproducts of the growth of the reciprocal link industry was the proliferation of spammy “link farms” and bulk email “link begging” campaigns. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites offering no real content. A “link begging” campaign refers to unsolicited bulk emails that request a reciprocal link.
These techniques for Web promotion/SEO are bad enough in and of themselves, but they are only a symptom of a larger problem.
Good Reciprocal Linking vs. Bad Reciprocal Linking
The largest potential problem posed by reciprocal linking is the phenomenon of sites that link to other sites that are utterly and completely unrelated. I will admit that even I will accept a link from a site that is unrelated to mine.
In a perfect world, the best backlink is a link from a site that is directly related to the topic/theme of your site. In the real world this is not always feasible. The next best thing is to acquire backlinks from sites that are “loosely” or “generally” related to your site. What do I mean by this? If you’re site is about some sort of business product like “inkjet cartridges,” then it is typically acceptable and desirable to link to other “business” related sites even if they are not specifically about ink jet cartridges. The reason for this is simple. First and foremost, there is a chance (however slim) that a Web user might click on your link while visiting the link directory of the site that you are reciprocating with. Secondly, it is very doubtful that the major search engines frown upon links from sites that are at least “loosely” related to your site, so the link that your are receiving should be somewhat beneficial in terms of SEO.
Unfortunately, many webmasters have decided that any and all reciprocal links are worth acquiring. Typically, these webmasters come from the pharmaceutical or gambling industries, but there are also a significant amount of “mainstream” webmasters that subscribe to this “one size fits all” philosophy. So what you end up with is countless irrelevant non-themed backlinks acquired via reciprocal linking. Because of the obscure and secretive nature of SEO, it is virtually impossible to definitively assert that non-related and/or non-themed backlinks are valueless or even harmful to SEO efforts, so the practice continues to be prevalent.
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