Balancing Inbound and Outbound Links - Where does the fear come from?
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Where does this fear come from? The fear comes from the knowledge that if you don't get found in the search engine's results pages (SERPs), then you just don't exist in the Internet world. Heaven forbid one may actually get traffic from other websites in the form of reciprocal linking. In the last year, reciprocal linking has gotten knocked around quite a bit. But it's not just reciprocal linking in general that should be looked down upon. It's when sites link to other sites that AREN'T similar that they start having problems, especially if a site isn't linking to other similar sites and being stingy with their links by only linking to their own family of sites. Google will put up with this for a while, but ultimately the spider wants to flow from one page to the next, then on from that site to a similar site in content in order a) to crawl efficiently and b) to be able to connect similar sites.
But because many webmasters are in too much of a hurry in their link-building strategies, combined with the fear of reciprocal links to the wrong types of sites, most of the SEO savvy webmasters just disregard the reciprocal links at all costs. In my opinion, this is just as bad as linking to everyone who asks for a link, regardless of the theme of the site. Why do I say this? For the sole reason that it is the same type of blatant disregard of that site's prime audience, and the refusal to provide the quality resources that good links are all about in the first place.
One of the major reasons reciprocal linking has been deprecated is the sheer massive numbers of links that some sites accumulate in a short period of time. In light of the view by the search engines that good websites will be linked to on their own, this inundation of links that a site gathers in a small period of time seems to do nothing more, in the eyes of a search engine, than artificially inflate that site's importance. Further, another major reason for reciprocal links to have lost their meaning is that when a site is providing links, it is providing resources to its audience. If you have a site dealing with barbecue grills, then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to provide a "resource" to Internet banking. And why on earth would that Internet banking site provide a link back to your barbecue site? Other than to inflate a site's importance, there really isn't any reason to.
Let's look at a few myths that have propagated throughout the Web with regards to link building, PageRank, and linking strategies.
Next: Beware the Link Myths >>
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