seoance

If you have been wondering if Reciprocal linking is still a
good idea, then read below. I’ll give you Google’s opinion
on it, as well as mistakes to avoid when linking with other
sites and how to correctly do a link exchange.

Google, says yes, links to your site are important! They
say to help you get a bigger search engine ranking, make
sure other sites link to yours.

By having other sites linking to yours, it helps Google’s
crawlers find your site and as well gives your site a greater
visibility in their search results.

Google uses their PageRank with sophisticated text-matching
techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant
to each search.

Google interprets links to your site as a “vote” for your site
from the other sites. Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives, it also analyzes
the page that casts the vote. “Votes” from sites that Google
considers “important” will weigh more heavily in determining
your search engine ranking.

Therefore, do NOT go out and try to get as many links as
possible. Google calls these “unnatural links” that are placed
there specifically to make your site look more popular to
the search engines. These types of links are link farms, or
linking schemes and doorway pages.

Google says in their Webmaster Guidelines:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your
site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web
spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own
ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

Link Farms:
I am seeing more and more webmasters asking for “three
way links”. For example, if you place their link on your site,
they will place your link on a different site other than their
main site. They try to justify it as a better solution than
reciprocating links from your site to theirs by saying
it’s a one way link to your site from the “link farm”.

Therefore, the “three way linkers” do not have any links
on their main site. They are getting higher quality sites to
link to them, making it appear that their site is more popular.

You get the short end of the stick! Your site’s link is now on
a site that is nothing more than a “link farm”.

Link farms are sites that have nothing but a huge directory of
links. The search engines do NOT see these as “important”.
So therefore, you have just hurt your site by agreeing to a
three way link exchange.

There are many reciprocal link management services and
link farm products. You will recognize them by the
template-based emails offering to exchange links. All of
them will want to place your link in nothing but a directory
of links (a link farm), where it does not do your site
any good at all and will actually harm your search engine
ranking.

Awhile back when I realized what was going on, I began
declining all “three way link” exchange offers. However, I
did keep those in my links directory, which had been
submitted before that. Now I see that was also a mistake.
My PageRank dropped a point. The PageRanks of my
links directory pages that had once been between 1 to
3, dropped to 0.

Therefore I have cleaned up my Links Directory and
deleted all sites that were “three way links”. You may want
to do the same if you want to improve your search engine
ranking.

How To Properly Do Reciprocal Link Exchanges:

DO go to websites that are relevant to your site’s theme.
Check to see if they have a “Links” page or it may be
listed as “Link Exchange Program”. These are usually
listed on websites in the lower left hand or right hand
columns or at the bottom of the site.

Follow their instructions for submitting your link, after all
you are the one asking them, not the other way around. If
they ask you to send an email, do it. If they ask you to fill out
a form to submit your request for a link exchange, do so.

Do NOT send them an email without even visiting their
site. I get so many emails that say, “I just visited your
wonderful site…. blah, blah, blah, it would be to both
our advantage to exchange links…”

I know they did not visit my site, if they did they would
have seen the link to my Link Exchange Program which
clearly states that I do not do exchanges by email, and
they must click on the link and fill out the request form.

I hope this helps you in understanding the significance
of links exchanges and how to avoid the pitfalls when
building your link exchange program.

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