Newsletters
2010 February
Reciprocal Link Building SEO
The importance of link building and developing inbound links to your website is critical when it comes to ranking in search engines between the first page or 100th page. It is the one of the most important SEO aspects, but it needs to be done correctly, over a period of time and on an ongoing basis.
There are many methods you can obtain inbound links, I discuss here one of them – the Reciprocal links. This term describes the trading of links between two websites, which basically works like this: “I will post your link on my website in exchange for you posting mine on yours”.
Considering that usually the link exchanges are done between people and websites which are unrelated and do not know each other, often on the opposite parts of the world, we do not know anything about the particular website and it is not easy to trust the person we just found on the internet.
Some webmasters are of an opinion that more inbound links the better page ranking for their site in search engines, however this can be a bad idea and can damage your site ranking instead of improving its position. The inbound links from spammy sites, sites banned by search engines, farm links sites and similar, as classified as those by the search engines , specially by Google, can negatively affect your site, can move it to a lower position or ban it completely.
The search engines use special formula to calculate each website’s position called PageRank, based on a number of factors, which also include inbound links. The way these links are calculated changes constantly as search engines adjust to constantly changing environment and also in prediction of future development, therefore the way we build them must evolve as well.
There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links with other websites:
- Links from Relevant sites count more – the search engines consider the relevancy of links, the overall opinion is that unrelated links give little or no weight whatsoever.
- Links from higher PageRanking and Relevant sites count more – websites which are longer time on the internet, have more inbound links, more visitors traffic, better content have higher PageRank and will benefit you better if they also have a relevant topic.
- Different search engines may rank the same site differently, what Google gives a PageRank of 3 for example, Yahoo may rank it higher, therefore relying on one engine’s ranking may be misleading.
- No-follow links will not benefit your website as they are blocked by the other webmaster. When you exchange links, check the other website’s source code (right click with your mouse anywhere on the website’s page and choose “view source” in the window which opens) for the robots tag. If it is set to: “noindex, nofollow” than the link even visible on this website’s page will not benefit your site as it instructs search engines not to follow it and visit your site.
- Use of robots.txt files to block search engines spiders to follow links – this set up is designed to block the files or folders at the root of the domain. If you look at the other sites robots file: http://www.domainname.com/robots.txt and see files or folders have links pages or directories which are blocked, that means the links will not exchange.
- Some links might be set up from a script and if the script and database folders are blocked from the search engines to access it, they will not be read by the search engines. This set up means that the files will not be listed in the excluded list but the links will not be counted. The way to see it is to view the cache of the page, if the page is cached but none of the links appear and the script directory is listed in the robots.txt file than this is the method used to prevent links exchange.
- Unethical webmasters using the above methods to block the links exchange with “no follow” try to benefit from your links but not give their links to you in exchange are not desired joint venture partners in your internet business.
- Use free internet tools to check the number of inbound links to your website – use Google webmasters tools, or search for terms like “inbound links checker” and you will find a lot of websites to give you this information for free.
- Links from pages with a large number of links count less – webmasters try to receive more but give less of the links as this weaken their site. The way it works is that each page gets 1 vote. A link to another website page counts as a vote for that site and improves its ranking. A page giving 10 outbound links to other sites will only give 0.1 of its one vote to each site, whereas 100 outbound links will give only 0.01 of its 1vote to each site. If a page gives only one link to another website page, this link is stronger as it equals to 1 vote, instead of 0.1 or even weaker 0.01. Any more thank 100 outbound links giving less than 0.01 of a vote does not count at all as it is too weak.
- Links go from and to individual website’s pages not websites as a whole. You can link to any website page and not necessarily to the home page.
- Use your keywords in page names and in page titles and link directly to those pages.
- The links placed higher up on the page, bold and heading 1 or 2, give more weight, so ask that your links are entered on the top of the page for better effect.
- Use the keywords as an anchor text to link for a maximum effect instead of the website’s name.
- Use the keywords or part of it in your domain name if you still can get them, this better optimizes the website for those keywords and link using those keywords as an anchor text links.
- Observe, test and change if one system does not work, employ different methods over time.
Because link building has become so important to improve search engine positioning, a lot of internet businesses offer link building for a fee. Be careful when selecting these companies as a lot of them do not know exactly what they are doing.
By Eve Rich
Internet Marketer
| 
2010 February