Reciprocal Links

A reciprocal link is a link placed on your website to another site and that other website lining back to yours - it's a mutual link between two sites for mutual benefit. The benefit of a reciprocal link is slowly diminishing as the latest search engine algorithms are placing less favour on reciprocal links and assigning higher value on one-way linking.

 

The major type of reciprocal link is as above where two websites link to each other to gain more traffic from each other but primarily to make their sites appear more popular to the search engines and thus rank higher. This type of linking is great for referrals and building trusted links but is slowly becoming less beneficial for search engine optimisation. THerefore new types have sprung up over the last few years.

 

One Way Linking:

A one way link is a term used to describe classic link building methods. A one way link is a single link from one site to another without any reciprocal backlink - thus the link goes "one way". A one way link is considered more "natural" in the eyes of the major search engines and is therefore gaining more value as algorithms progress. A one way link to your site from another site is highly valued - especially if the link text (anchor text) uses one of your preferred keywords, however, these links are usually the hardes to atain as the referrer gains nothing in return.

 

Multi-Way Linking:

To provide a kickback to the referrer for one-way linking, multi-level linking emerged. Mulit-level liking is essentially a collaboration of multiple sites which link to each other in a circular fashion. or example site A links to Site B who links to site C who then returns the link back to site A (site A > site B > site C > site A). This gives the appearance of one way linking but each member of the chain benefits from at least one qualified backlink.

 

Incestuous Linking:

With the introduction of Social Networking sites like MySpace and Facebook etc many companies have created their own profile on these sites and linked them all back to their main website to increase the number of incoming links and thus artificially inflate their ranking without real merit. While social network marketing and blogging should definately have a place in your marketing mix it should not be used just to "trump up" your main site ranking. One thing you can be sure of is that this kind of activity will soon be targeted by search engine algorithms and guity sites will lose their page rank.

 

The key to generating valuable traffic from reciprocal links is to remember the context of the referring link and the traffic/audience type enjoyed by te referrer. If you get one-way links from 150 sites then that's great - but what if all of thos sites are completely irrelevant to your market offering? Three key things happen in this case: 1) no one clicks the link as it's irrelevant 2) the search engines either begin to categorise your site within the wrong context (see co-citation) or your page rank score drops because of perceived diversification/dilution and 3) your referrer's visitors will begin to get annoyed with the referrer showing irrelevant content and casue a possible drop in traffic to your referrer - if that happens they will drop the link.

 

On the flipside - if you only get 20 links that are highly targeted and relevant your site is much more likely to generate qualified click throughs, be indexed correcty by the search engines and potentially generate more conversions. On top of this your relationship with the referrer will only grow in strength and further affiliate marketing or referral marketing schemes can be drawn up together.

 

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