Reciprocal Links: Quality is as important as Quantity
By Donald Nelson
Link popularity, the number
of incoming links to your website, plays an important part
in determining your site’s ranking in a search engine. But,
before you rush off to try and get any and all sites to link
to you there are a few things to consider, and one of them
is that the quality of the links are as important as the
quantity.
If you get a link to your
site from Yahoo, then your own site’s ranking in various
search engines will be enhanced, as Yahoo is one of the most
popular sites on the Internet. Ranking of course is not a
precise term, and varies from search engine to search
engine. But if you want to be consistent, you can use the
Google Toolbar, and the Google page ranking, shown in the
toolbar, as way of judging how well you are doing. Google
ranks a page from 0-10, and a site with a 0 ranking will not
do well in searches, especially in very competitive
categories. So when it comes to finding link partners one
guideline is to find sites that have a Google ranking that
is equal to or higher than yours.
A site with a 0 ranking will
not help you. Also, sometimes a site has a relatively good
page ranking but its links page is 0, and this is the page
that links to you, thus it is very important. So the
question is why is the links page 0 when the rest of the
site is OK? Some sites use robotic tools to create what are
known as “link farms. Link farms are huge collections of
links, a giant directory that dwarfs the original web site.
These were set up by people hoping to increase their link
popularity very fast. However search engines got wise to
this, and do not give any importance to such directories,
hence you will see a 0 ranking for them.
So, if it is a link farm,
don’t participate in a link exchange with that site. It will
not help you, and some observers say that a link from a
“link farm” will actually harm your standing. I am not sure
if it will harm you, but it is definitely not going to help
you.
Another important thing to
consider is whether the links page or directory on the other
site is visible to the public. This might seem elementary,
but some people like to get reciprocal links but don’t
really display them fairly, because they don’t want people
leaving their site through the reciprocal links. The links
page should be linked to at least one of the major pages of
the site, if it is not, then don’t puruse the link. One
time, I noticed this on another site and objected. The
webmaster acknowledged my point and changed the site to
properly display the links page.
Similarly, if your link on
the other site will be in sea of hundreds of unsorted links,
like on the free-for-all links pages, this is not valuable
to you, because such a site has little chance of sending you
any traffic.
What are the best sites to
link to? A site that has good content, a site that your web
visitors will think is a valuable resource. While you can’t
take responsibility for everything that is on the other
person’s website, you shouldn’t knowingly send your web
visitors to a low-quality website. So be selective in
pursuing reciprocal links, and in responding to requests for
links. Visit the other site and see what it is all about
before jumping to link with them.
The ideal link partner should
be a site thematically related to yours, with the kind of
visitors who will also be interested in your site. It should
give your link the kind of prominence that will enable you
to get some traffic, and finally, the site should have a
decent page ranking. If you get all of these factors
together, you can be sure that it is a quality link and
worth your effort in making the contact and setting up the
link exchange. Check your logs from time to time and see
which links are performing well, and then try to find
similar link partners.
Reciprocal linking takes time
if you want to do it correctly, but the targeted traffic
that it can generate coupled with the enhancement of your
page ranking that it can provide, makes it an important part
of overall website promotion.
Be sure to read these related
articles:
Improving Your Site's Link Popularity and Search Engine
Ranking
How to Choose Your Link Partners
How to Get Non-Reciprocal Links, and Improve Your Page Rank
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and
social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently
the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com),
a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.
© Copyright 2003, Donald Nelson, all rights reserved.
