He Says, She Says
Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!
He says, she says. What is in the cards for reciprocal links? I have been involved in a correspondence with a link “expert” that works at a very well known SEO firm who says Google is going to eliminate the value of reciprocal links altogether, and have been doing so for the past three months.
Google is really looking at the quality of your links. They want only one way and quality rather than junk. All reciprocal links will not be worth anything. Directory links will not be worth anything. Press releases will not count. Google wants only high quality complimentary ‘one way’ links and links from ‘testimonial’ sites. And Google has already started adjusting their index and deleting sites. This ‘house cleaning’ will continue until January. This has actually been going on for about 3 months.
I understand that Google sees most reciprocal links as “unnatural”, yet aren’t there many scenarios to consider in which reciprocal linking is natural? I mean come on, ALL reciprocal links will have no value? As for reciprocal links in the form of link pages, well that’s a given as far as that getting the ax. But what if the reciprocal links are within good quality content? If what this guy is saying is true, then the world of SEO is in for a real shock with its current linking methods.
Like this post? Subscribe to the RSS feed and get lots more!
I have competitors that have almost all one way links to their site and I’m beating them out with a site with mostly reciprocal links. The thing is that their site has most of their one way links coming off sites that are not theme related. I think my relevant, reciprocal links have more weight in the search engines.
Besides, isn’t there real value to the user in relevant reciprocal linking? Are business partners going to have to put nofollows on links to each other just to please Google?
December 6th, 2005 at 10:49 am