Reciprocal Links: Are They Really So Bad? - Sorting Out the Links: The Bad

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Not all reciprocal linking arrangements are given high marks by either the site visitors or by the search engines. The least valuable reciprocal links are link swaps involving link farms. Such arrangements are in violation of the search engine webmaster guidelines. Instead of benefiting a site, linking to such bad neighborhoods can result in penalties being imposed or the site being banned from the search engine indexes entirely.

Link farms are bad news for any website owner. Becoming involved with such undesirable schemes whose sole purpose is to artificially increase PageRank and link popularity is a huge mistake. The link farm requirements of multiple link placements regardless of site topic is counterproductive. Any benefits gained will be very short term at best and could lead to a site being severely penalized or banned from the search engines at worst.

Less well known but providing minimal if any value are link trades between completely unrelated websites. Made with only the search engines in mind, these non-theme related links are not given much weight in the current versions of the various search engine algorithms. Google, in particular, has apparently downgraded their value to almost nil.

The value of these non-related links has been reduced to near worthlessness, either in PageRank transfer or in link popularity boost. It is almost pointless for the website owner to pursue unrelated links any longer. The time spent searching and offering link trades,with non-related websites would be far better spent on adding fresh content. Instead of exchanges, natural one-way incoming links would be the result.

Providing little in the way of search engine value and of almost no interest to website visitors, irrelevant links might even do more harm to a site than good. In fact, site visitors who are your potential paying customers, might even be repelled by pages of links that have nothing in common with the topics of the site.

Next: Using Reciprocal Links Wisely >>
 

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