Reciprocal Links – Do they add value?
Digital marketing managers often suffer from an onslaught of emails from owners/managers of Web sites that want to “trade links”. Simply, another site is willing to put your website URL and a short description of your services in exchange for you doing the same on your site. Reciprocal linking, as it’s more formally labeled, was a fairly successful method of building link juice to elevate a website’s rankings in natural search results (many years ago). Reciprocal links now have little to no value to Search Engine Optimization efforts and managers have to be more strategic in developing backlinks to their website.
In the past, many marketers took a shotgun approach to link building, sending out a massive number of generic requests to trade links. This was (and still is) very typical for affiliate marketers and small businesses hoping to get some traffic and (more importantly) an improved PageRank for their website. There are several major flaws in this link building approach:
- The format for directory-style listings on “link pages” provide little opportunity to use custom anchor text (linking to the URL instead)
- Trading links no longer offers the SEO benefits seen in the past
- Results in the formation of “link farms”, which are now looked down upon by the search engines and will not help improve rankings.
Instead of focusing merely on the number of backlinks to your website, prioritize quality and diversity in your link building efforts. Quality links come from credible Web sites relevant to the products or services you offer. There are several quality-related questions you should consider when developing a link building strategy:
- Is the link on a website related to my product or service?
- Does my link use keyword-rich anchor text?
- Is the link on a credible website?
In addition to quality, you should ensure you’re developing a diverse link profile, sourcing links from a range of Web sites (including blogs, articles, social media, bookmarking, etc.) instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Links from various types of Web sites, especially sites viewed as credible resources, result in the links appearing to have been acquired in a more natural manner to the search engines and enhances their effectiveness. This is because the goal of the search engine algorithms is to provide improved rankings based on what their users link to, not links that are acquired through link building campaigns – so the more ‘naturally acquired’ your link profile seems to be, the better the results. By including quality and diversity in your link building campaign, you ensure the highest probability of success for this aspect of your marketing program.
Developing quality content and a syndication strategy is critical for link building success. First, you need content seen as valuable to a website’s users (often referred to as “link bait”). This content can take several forms including a blog, case study, a tool/application and technical information. After developing the content, it is very important to develop strategies to syndicate the content to interested users, Web sites and the community in general. Quality content has no value from a link building perspective unless people are able to find it (and link to it).
The shotgun approach is no longer an effective link building approach, and marketers must develop more elegant content-based strategies to create quality backlinks to their website in order to maximize the benefit to their program.
Tags: Link Building, reciprocal links
