Reciprocal Links

Some guy named Matt posted on his rather obscure blog about his adventures at the recent Vegas Pubcon. Anyway, apparently, he knows a little something about SEO and stuff like that. He made a good point about reciprocal links. Usually, when a site is new, this is the main strategy for the webmaster. The goal is to get other websites to link to this brand new one. The path of choice is to try the “if you link to my site, I will link to yours” approach.

While this does get you some IBLs, they are not usually very high quality IBLs. Usually, they come from a page with a low pagerank. Sometimes, you may not even be getting credit for the backlink if the linking website uses javascript or redirects – yuk. So, what is a noob webmaster to do? Matt (the guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post) had some good advice:

Several times during the session, it was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.

So, reciprocal links are not really the best way to go. Instead, create some good content, tell all of your friends about your new site, comment on some blogs and forums and submit the new site to some quality directories (check out vilesilencer.com). Give these steps a try and you will be well on your way to plenty of quality IBLs.