Marketing Defined

Is a Reciprocal Linking Strategy Necessary?

The effectiveness of a new online entrepreneurs’s Reciprocal Linking Strategy is diluted, and at times discounted when inexperienced and overzealous Webmaster’s carry on exchanging links with just about any Tom, Dick or Harry gracious enough to grant them a link .

Google’s recent Jagger algorithm, certainly confirms this fact.

Although many webmasters have reported that Yahoo and MSN do not penalise for this inappropriate exchange, I firmly believe the original concept of reciprocal linking is what you should aim for:

.. that is to build partnerships with *related* web sites and spread your reach within a specific industry or topic.

This simply means that an exchange of reciprocal links should be primarily made with related websites - AND - only from industries fitting snugly in to the *theme* of your website.

In spite of conflicting advice from some SEO specialists, I have religiously stuck to this concept when exchanging links, and rarely exchange links with webmasters outside of my website’s theme.

Do you believe recommending a link to a website that was not of interest to your targeted audience would do anything positive for you? Your visitors will only keep returning to a website which consistently updates its quality content and gives recommendations to other quality websites

Traffic from an irrelevant site will be of no benefit, just like the traffic one gets from irrelevant rankings in the SERPs.

I’ll take this a notch further to include *Page Rank*.

When you want to trade links with another web site, don’t look only at the *Page Rank* of that site.

Instead, ask yourself: Is the web site related to your site and does it make sense for web surfers if they linked to you and you linked to them - AND - could visitors of the other website be interested in the contents of your site?

If you find a web site that you or your visitors would want to visit, then link to it and ask for a link back to your site. This is an effective Reciprocal Linking Strategy.

Reciprocal links should only make up a small percentage of your overall linking strategy. You should also:

• buy one way text ads on relevant sites
• submit quality press releases
• consitently write and submit articles
• gain inclusion in good directories
• post in related forums

Jill Whalen wisely compounded the above, in her recent reply (quoted below) to the question “Isn’t reciprocal linking all about tricking the search engines.. if there were no search engines will you spend so much time to obtain all those reciprocal links” — via, this informative thread at the Search Engine Forum on the subject Reciprocal Linking - Dead or Alive :

I would imagine, you’d want those reciprocal links even more if there were no search engines as you’d need more ways for people to find your sites.

I was doing recip. linking in the mid 90’s when it wasn’t for search rankings at all.. just plain old traffic and getting the word out. Good recip. links still work that way today.

Note that I said GOOD ONES though. Unfortunately, most people these days aren’t looking for good ones.. or aren’t getting them, or something. They’re just getting any old links, which is just plain dumb!

My next post analyzes the outcome of the recent Google *Jagger* algorithm and page rank update, which also confirmed the need for an *effective* Reciprocal Linking Strategy.

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