SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Linking is a powerful strategy used to get noticed in the SERPs. For new sites, reciprocal linking can be a great way to get the site noticed and indexed by the search engines. It also gives you an opportunity to learn what’s involved in the linking process between two sites.

Reciprocal linking is whereby site A points to site B and site B reciprocates the link by linking back to site A.

This can be used to create a list of resources that would be useful to your visitors.

The value of reciprocal links is believed to be lesser than previously. This is because it is easier to detect such an arrangement and can be construed as a method to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

If a site has value, you should link to it regardless of whether it links back to you.

While it is great to have a lot of sites linking to you, you need to be careful about linking to bad neighborhoods. Linking to bad neighborhoods will get your site penalized. Therefore, not all request for links to be reciprocated should be honored. Visit the site and check it out thoroughly.

You’ll generally want to avoid getting links from adult, pharmacy, and gambling sites unless your site is of that nature. Having those kind of links not only reflects badly on your site, it might also result in search engine penalties because many use questionable black-hat SEO techniques which you’ll want to avoid like the plague.

A more in-depth discussion on types of sites considered bad-neighborhoods and what to look out for will be covered in a future article.

Following the previous article on “good” links to obtain, I mentioned briefly about topical sites linking to another relevant site.

What is relevancy?

Does it mean a real estate agent (or choose your industry) should only link to other real estate agents (or of the same industry)?

Just like traditional advertising, you’ll want to target the market you’re dealing with laser-like precision.

In this case, a real estate agent deals with the subject of real estate. Ask yourself the questions: “What would my prospect or client like to see on my site?” or “What would my prospects or clients consider as useful resources?”

Links that would benefit visitors to a real estate agent could include: mortgage brokers, pest control companies, contractors, pool cleaners, home inspectors, credit reporting agencies, etc. You get the idea.

These links are not just confined to text links for link popularity. They include banner ads, affiliate products/services or even pay-per-lead links on your site.

Relevancy can also be maintained even though it comes from a seemingly unrelated site. Take for example a web hosting company and a printer providing printing services. As a web hosting company, common links to be found would be related to domain name registration, web design, web promotion, etc.

But to a printer? What’s the connection?

The key is in the page the link resides. If a link is placed on a categorically relevant links page to the printer (printing services or B2B resources, or related topic etc), this link becomes a relevant and useful link to the printer. The same applies for the printer’s web page pointing to the web hosting company.

An even better link would be one to the printer coming from a specific, tightly focused category like Digital Printing, Offset Printing, Print on Demand, etc which tends to be more descriptive about the site and contains other similar links and descriptions in the links pages.

Generally speaking, though, a link in a categorically relevant page is sufficient.

Links found on competitors back-links (by using the built in search engine tools like “link:www.anysite.com” on Google, Yahoo, and MSN) are also categorically relevant.

Relevancy is an important factor to take into consideration when trading, exchanging, buying one-way links, something which we will cover in more detail later.

There are really no good, better, or best links to obtain in my opinion. There are only bad ones you want to avoid.

A link is a link is a link. Sure, you can have an authority site with a high PR of 8 or 9 pointing to your site but is that one link really better than 10-15 relevant links from low or no PR sites?

Quality and quantity are BOTH important. While some obsess over getting certain PR links to their site, it is a focus to waste too much effort on. If you come across a good site that would be a good candidate to get a link from, by all means go ahead and get it. But spending all the time in the world to do it is another matter.

Just consider this from a search engine point of view. If a relatively new site with a PR0 suddenly got a bunch of PR 5s, 6s, and 7s to point to them, it would look pretty unnatural. Or if this same site suddenly got an influx of 50-100 inbound links when historically it has averaged about 5-7 a month, it would look unnatural.

A good rule of thumb: If you think some tactic you use looks unnatural to the search engines, it probably is.

If the search engine considers it unnatural, chances are you and the other site owner could be hit with penalties in your PR, be de-listed from the search engine index, or even sandboxed. An article about the Google Sandbox will be covered in more extensive detail in a later installment.

A good site will have a variety of similar topical sites pointing to it from lots of different servers. This is the most natural looking and one that will give any site longevity in search engine rankings.

Remember, it’s about relevancy, not Page Rank. Relevancy is the major key to the future of rankings.