Do Reciprocal Links Hurt My Seo effort ?
The idea that links from other sites to your own, actually aid your site, is a logical one. But can back-links hurt or harm your ranking?
Most of us search engine optimization afficionados have a deep understanding of what this term means, but for the rest of us it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
Pre-google, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and this was acceptable for a while but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts due to not just the potential for spam but because a kind of very real link REAL spam that was taking place in this area.
The word "Spam" is known by some as ham, but in internet lingo its also known as the email that floods your inbox and makes it difficult to find the real mail.
Examples of this, some marketers send out unsolicited blog comments to thousands of open blogs in an attempt to gain back links. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same organization or which chain of anchored links were sharing the same IP Address. In order to thwart those who would fill our inboxes with junk, this information is collected and analyzed as it's rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
Perhaps one of the most important parts of the backlinking process is which keywords one uses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have fallen down.
Why? We can't specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?
Also, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. Would this be the correct thing to do? A brand new online entity, even after being indexed by Google or most search engines, doesn't stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords - sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.
Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?
The potential problems don't stop there. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is worst and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will definitely work against it.
But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a grandly popular Web 2.0 social network property like kijji or facebook, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won't be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
And as some will be quick to point out, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.
Technical babble galore - the question really is - So, what's a girl to do?
Many seo experts might say, go back to basics, create good and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that you even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.I like both this phrase and the thought if you understand in the faintest what link-bait is. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the decision to get involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles almost daily, and to publish a huge amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own - If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.
There has to be ways around this. What should one do?
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