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The Great Reciprocal Linking Myth

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 11, 2007 in Link Theory, Seo Myths, Web spam

There are three kinds of Web sites people are most likely to link to:

1. Their own sites (the “sister” sites linking syndrome)
2. Their friends’ and relatives’ sites (the “buddy network” syndrome)
3. The sites that rank first on search engines for related topics

People do occasionally link to very well-qualified sources of information, but such links are rare compared to the first three types of links.

To create a truly useful, accurate, informative resource on the Web you need three elements:

1. Intimate knowledge of the subject
2. Excellent skill at designing Web sites
3. Knowledge of the people who are seeking the information you offer

It is an extremely rare and valuable individual who brings all three elements together.

It could be said that I have intimate knowledge of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and that I know who looks for such sites and how. But when it comes to Web site design, well, I’m not very good at creating the kind of graphic-intensive content and designs that impress most Tolkien fans. I get by on information and accuracy, which in many topics is enough for at least the moderate success I have enjoyed.

In fact, Web design often outperforms informative, accurate information. Time and time again you’ll find less informative but much more impressive Web content ranking higher than the most reliable sources of information. Accurate presentation is not hard to optimize, it’s just not really relevant to very much.

That is, the less accurate, reliable, and informative a document truly is, the more likely it is to be relevant to many topics. Why is that? Because specialized knowledge is usually conveyed with specialized language. Perform some queries for specific topics from the fields of mathematics, physics, and psychology. The Web content you find is usually so esoteric it won’t rank for much of anything else.

People don’t link to good information sources. They link to information sources that are easy to find and look convincingly good. Search engines don’t favor good information sources in their results, they favor sources that are most likely to be easy to find and which have convincingly good optimization.

So what does that have to do with reciprocal linking? Reciprocation has been around for as long as Jim and John have been buds who knew how to create Web sites. As soon as Jim had his site up, John was linking to it. And Jim made sure he linked to John’s as well.

Even today, most reciprocation comes from our personal networks regardless of what types of sites (commercial or non-commercial) we make. A lot of business sites get their first links from “sister” sites, friend sites, and relative sites. That’s just the way it is.

Managed reciprocation has been around for as long as anyone thought there might be money in the process. As with any gold rush, as soon as the value of having links was quantified, those who made the most money were the folks selling the picks and shovels to the miners rather than the guys digging for the gold.

That doesn’t mean every managed link provider has succeeded. It just means that a lot of money has been spent on managing reciprocal links. People seek out reciprocal links for the same wrong reasons they buy links and resort to other “illegitimate” practices: they want to manipulate their search engine rankings.

Now, link managers can tell you that the best reciprocal links are the links that send you traffic, improve your visibility, and don’t get clobbered by search engine filters. Maybe, if you’re lucky, those links will even pass some value in the search indexes and help you with some anchor text and PageRank. You can always hope for the best, right?

But the problem is that reciprocal linking, like all other forms of link spamming, has been closely scrutinized by the search engines. Some reciprocal links get caught. Others don’t. People become frustrated when they see obvious reciprocal links go “unpunished”. Why is that?

Search engines cannot dictate who links to whom. All they can do is figure out which linking relationships seem to be harmful to the quality of their indices. That is the crux of the issue. If a search engine feels that its search results are best served by, say, favoring Wikipedia (a site well-known to be unreliable but nonetheless very popular with people who don’t just how unreliable the resource really is), then that search engine will not be happy about reciprocal linking programs (or any form of link spam) that are designed to push Wikipedia articles out of the top search results.

To put it another way, if you’re competing for a query where the search results clearly don’t reflect intimate knowledge of a topic, excellent skill at Web design, and knowledge of the people who are seeking intimate knowledge of the topic, you’re most likely competing with people on the basis of manipulation. It could be the search engine is manipulating results or it could be that someone else is manipulating results.

Whereas search engines have every right to manipulate their results, anyone else who attempts to manipulate search results is risking a loss of visibility by violating the search engine’s guidelines. So make no mistake about what you do when you go seeking links: you are striving to manipulate the search engine’s results.

The only way reciprocal linking cannot be viewed as an attempt to manipulate search engine results is if the links are not allowed to pass value by the linkers. That is, if you really want to exchange links with other Web sites and avoid risking loss of value and visibility in the search engines, you should only be seeking out links the search engines either won’t see or won’t allow to pass value.

Now, how many of you are ready and willing to pay someone to get you all the ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ links you can pay for?

How much money are you willing to pay for 1,000 Javascript links?

Some business operators are savvy enough to say, “I’ll pay for any link that drives me enough traffic to at least pay for itself”.

That’s really all that you should be concerned with. If you cannot measure return on investment from your links, why are you paying for them? Do you really need PageRank if you’re getting traffic?

Reciprocal linking began as a means of building visibility and drawing traffic before search engines were concerned with links. If you engage in reciprocal linking for the sake of building visibility and traffic without regard for what happens in the search engines, how much care will you place in your choice of linking partners?

After all, if someone with traffic to pass gives you a link, won’t that someone want some value in return? And if you don’t have traffic, then what else do you have to offer?

In reciprocal linking, there are five types of value to be bartered: traffic, PageRank/Anchor text, visibility, information, and design. If you take search engines out of the picture — that is, if you only go for Javascript or nofollowed links — then you have only four things to barter with: traffic, visibility, information, and design.

But if you have no traffic then you really cannot offer visibility, either. So your reciprocal linking value is based upon the information and design you bring to the exchange. The better your information, the better your design, the more people who will want to exchange links with you.

Why? Because they’ll always exchange links with quality resources.

So if it’s in your best interest to pass the quality test for reciprocal linking, what does that tell you about whom you should be exchanging links with?

In fact, can you read between the lines and see the deeper lesson to be learned here? When should you reciprocate and for how long?