Reciprocal Link Exchange
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Editors Note: The tips listed below are dated and shouldn't be used any longer. Here's a great article on link building tactics that will actually hurt your website.
Link popularity is probably in the top 3 of the most important parts of achieving a top search engine ranking. Search engines such as Google are built around the concept of link popularity to determine their search results.
Linking methods have changed enormously in the past few years so it's important to stay on top of the current trends. One trend that's changed is reciprocal link exchanges. Although the practice of reciprocal links hasn't changed, the methods in which you do so along with the criteria of the sites that you exchange links with has drastically changed.
What Is Reciprocal Link Exchange?
Reciprocal link exchanges is the practice of exchanging links with another website. This is done by placing a link somewhere on your website and in exchange the owner of that website will link back to you.
The purpose of this is, for a lack of a better term, a popularity contest. The more websites that link to your website the better your search results. Before you stop reading and just exchange links with any mom and pop website be sure to read this entire page because this no longer holds true.
You need to consider what websites you exchange links with, you need to consider how you are placing the links on your website and you need to consider how the website is linking back to you. I'll cover each of these topics below.
Just to the left I've included an image that sort of demonstrates how reciprocal link exchanges work. You'll find that website A links to website B. In exchange website B links back to website A.
What Websites Should I Exchange Links With?
This is one area of link exchanges that has really changed. Just a few years ago you could link with any site that you wanted. If your website was about cars, you could exchange with a website about monkeys and the link was just as valuable.
When webmasters got wind of this they just exchanged links with any website on the internet and therefore were able to easily manipulate their search engine ranking by just exchanging links with more websites than their competition.
In order to combat this and to try and provide relevant search results the major search engines have modified their algorithms to require some additional research.
The information that I'm about to provide primarily relates to Google but you'll find that this information really pertains to any search engine.
Search engines now consider the quality of the website, the number of links from a webpage and the website content in determining how worthy the link to your website is. These are all things that you must now consider before deciding to accept a link invitation.
Google has come up with a method of determining the quality of a website called Page Rank or commonly referred to as PR. It's based on a scale from 1 - 10 with 10 being a truly valuable website. It's difficult to find websites with a Page Rank of 10 but a couple of them are Google themselves, Adobe.com, WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov.
From what I know there are about a dozen websites with a Page Rank of 10 so you can see that it's a very elite club.
The idea is that the higher the PR the more valuable the link is. Another important factor is site relevancy, how close are the topics of the two websites. If your website is related to 'How To Make A Website', a link from another website somewhat related to making a website is going to be more valuable than a link from a website about cooking recipes.
Another factor to consider is where the link to your website is coming from. Is it a link that recommends your product or service with unique content or is it coming from a page that simply has a link to 50 other websites. This is another area to consider because the link from the page with the unique content and a limited number of links is definitely more valuable.
What Is Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text used to link to your website. The reason that this is important is that it's one way that search engines can determine what your website is about.
I'm going to use my website as an example. When I am exchanging links with a quality website I try to ensure that my main keywords of How To Make A Website are used. With that said, you definitely will want to change this up some.
The practice of having every single website link to you is a black hat technique that websites frown on. As a matter of fact, you can now be penalized for this so be sure to mix up the keywords.
In my link exchange campaign for WebsiteToad.com I requested that webmasters link to WebsiteToad.com using the text 'How To Make A Website'.
The HTML code would appear as:
<a href="https://www.websitespot.com/articles">How To Make A Website</a>
The link would appear as How To Make A Website on their website.
As I mentioned you'll want to mix it up with the anchor text to avoid a penalty. Actually it just makes sense, there will be websites that focus on a specific topic and you'd like to do everything that you can to draw their attention. You may just get traffic from the link as well.
Link Exchange Software
I'm simply mentioning this because managing links on multiple websites can be difficult so there are a few companies out there that have developed link exchange applications that help you keep track of your link exchange campaigns.
In my opinion the best on the market is IBP Seo Software. It allows you to keep track of websites that link to your website and will run a script to ensure that a partner hasn't removed your link without notifying you.
With that said, IBP Seo Software is only recommended to assist with managing your campaigns. You will want to manually find quality websites to exchange with and personally contact them to offer a link invitation.
These days people have become accustomed to receiving automated link exchange requests that they simply delete them without even researching the request. My suggestion is to write a personal email to the webmaster and introduce yourself and your website. You'll find that you get a better response than with an automated email request.
This may seem like more work but consider what I said above, the quality of the website is extremely important. Exchanging links with 10 - 12 quality websites is most likely more beneficial than linking with 100 low quality websites.
Quality Over Quantity
As you can see from the length of this page, linking is a very important part of achieving prime search engine rankings. If you took the time to read through this page you'll find that the quality of the link to your website is more important than the quantity.
One last thing that I just remembered make sure that if you choose a naming convention stick with it. If you start by requesting links that link to http://www.yourdomain.com then stick with it as opposed to site just linking to http://yourdomain.com without the www.
I don't know for sure that it matters but it certainly won't hurt.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.