Why Google says reciprocal linking is bad

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Caroline Wethington

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Jan 27, 2009 3:47:07 PM

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While Google is usually cryptic in its responses, it says pretty much right here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-link-based-popularity.html

'To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.'

This says that exchanged links are frowned upon.

This has been the case for nearly a half-decade; just 3½ years ago, one major real estate website company had to hire on outside SEO strategists to help protect it against quickly falling rankings due to its failed link exchange campaigns on nearly 45,000 clients.

We have thousands of sites that we monitor performance on, on an ongoing basis. Because of that, we are able to see which strategies work, and which ones do not. I can tell you that surely as anything else, exchanging links not only does not help, but most often harms the websites ranking. The reason behind this is simple: email campaigns which promise links in exchange for others often renege on their commitment to link back to your site. This leads us into a situation where our client sends an outbound link to another site, "bleeding" some weight to the targeted site, while receiving none in return. This is a 100% bad scenario and helps only the "scamming" site. In the best-case scenario, they link to a more popular site, then the more popular site links to them (and thousands of others), giving a very small percentage of the total possible outbound weight to our client, as it is shared amongst everyone being linked to.

Bottom line, as has been stated for years by those in the know-link exchanges are bad. They are not good, the odds are not in your favor, and more often than not, you will not receive the promised inbound link. Even if you do-it will only help to minimize the negative effects of this type of campaign. It is time to start learning from the major mistakes of others, time to start listening to what the search engines are stating they are looking for… because believe it or not-sometimes they're pretty up-front about it-and it's time to start building the right way, organically, and with powerful one-way links."

Caroline Wethington

Compass Internet Systems

http://Blackwater.RealTown.com

RealTown Approved Vendor

http://www.realtown.com/CarolineWethington/groups/real-seo

Edited by Caroline Wethington on Jan 27, 2009 3:48:21 PM

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