Comments on: Your Mamma Don’t Dance and Reciprocal Links Are Not Dead

By: Craig Smith

Craig Smith — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:49:24 +0000

Great post. Often I need to convince clients and colleagues that recip links are not dead and this provides some great data to go from. In "hub" areas within a certain keyword theme, recips can be a great way to boost page rank and establish a level of trust. The real key is what happens after the organic click. The fact that most businesses and retailers are not multivariate testing astounds me.

By: Vertaling Engels

Vertaling Engels — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:04:38 +0000

Interesting test. I always preferred to avoid reciprocal links for most of my websites because I feel a link page would look unprofessional for a serious business.

I just associated link exchange with sleazy cheap websites. But if you do really exchange only with relevant websites, then I guess it’s not bad, you even offer more value to your visitor.

By: LDN Hotels

LDN Hotels — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:56:20 +0000

I’d dismissed recip links not just because of reading about them being bad, but because I’d always associated them with home page, hobby sites(Sorry Mike!). But again it looks like it comes down to, do something for the user and it doesn’t hurt on the SEO front.

Can anyone think of good sites to target for recip links for a site for hotels in London? I suppose anything a visitor to London wants or needs is ripe for the taking.

By: Stoney deGeyter

Stoney deGeyter — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:02:01 +0000

Alfred, I completely agree. It would make no sense to devalue those types of reciprocal links. I’ve made that argument in the past, but thought I’d leave it out of the equation above just to keep things simple. I spoke with one SEO guru who told me that he thought the search engines could completely discount all reciprocal links 100% and it would not effect results. I completely disagree, I think it would completely.

By: Alfred Malveo

Alfred Malveo — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:07:29 +0000

I have linked to sites such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, Techmeme, Small Business SEM, Search Engine Watch, and the list goes on. I have done so because I either found something resourceful to my readers, something that helped to support what I was writing about or simply due to the fact that the site I linked to was the original source of my own writing. These same sites have in turn linked back to our site for the very same reasons. That is true reciprocal linking. So is this a bad thing? Is Google, or any other search engine going to devalue those links because they are not true “one-way” links? I don’t think so. This is a natural process of the web and search engines are smart enough to understand that.

By: Pierre

Pierre — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:05:31 +0000

Asking for reciprocal link is a long but worthy work.

By: Calligaris

Calligaris — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 04:49:30 +0000

I have recently noticed may of top ranked sites in my industry are big on reciprocal links. Number of them have the network of websites sitting on different IPs and they link to each other and rank real good.
Your article is great and it’s a practical prove that reciprocal links are not dead and probably never will be.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 07:39:40 +0000

Here here, astudent! it’s the Google dance yee be a seein! nice work Stoney, but I don’t think it’s that easy to derive conclusive evidence that webmasters can really rely on, it would take a test with hundreds of pages and multiple terms, probably.

P.S. we should obey Matts Cutts, he is our deity, he is our oracle, he is our guiding light and indispensable wisdom

By: astudent

astudent — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:58:08 +0000

One swallow does not a summer make. One web page does not a linking strategy show. Your results are not statistically significant, and there might be other one page or environmental factors (eg competitiveness of arena). Plus I believe Google continuously tweaks their algos according to NYT article, which would explain the time varying results.

By: Mike Detriech

Mike Detriech — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:36:37 +0000

thanks for your post on reciprocal linking.. My hobby site which sells model airplane parts is linked up with over 400 other related hobby sites through traditional link exchange. I manage my reciprocal links with linksmanager.com. my search rankings are better than ever.

I get tired of all of the paranoia surrounding link exchange. I got all of my link exchanges slowly over a long period of time. link exchange will always exist as long as their is a world wide web.

By: Stoney deGeyter

Stoney deGeyter — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:12:41 +0000

Lately? No, but I’ve seen that movie many many times as a kid. One of my all-time faves. Yeah, the theme from The Sting would make nice background music here!

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:07:40 +0000

Really random question prompted by your subtitles: Have you been watching The Sting lately? (I watched it again Tuesday.) If so, should we have a Joplin soundtrack for this post?