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?
Many of us search engine optimization experts will know what this terminology means, but for the non technical it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.
Post Altavista if you can remember that far back, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and this was acceptable for a while but Google and others soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because too many of the reciprocal links were contrived and not natural.
Spam is known to many of us as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn't help myself, but in internet lingo it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.
Examples of this, too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited blog comments to thousands of open blogs in an attempt to gain back links. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites 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 these items such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same group or which chain of anchored links were sharing the same IP Address. In order to slow down those who would fill our inboxes with junk, this information is considered carefully used by the search engines as it is rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects to the backlinking process is in what 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.
Secondly, 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. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very 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.
So, possibly a waste of time, right?
But there is yet another major problem. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where 0 is not good and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will definitely not work in its favor.
But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a very 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 associated with.
All sounds rather complicated huh? What can a novice do ?
Google would say, go back to basics, ensure that you are putting up great and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that you even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.And that's inherently a great idea if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Ignoring Google's advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the decision to get involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Do you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site - If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.
Many more questions than answers, huh?
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