Are reciprocal links bad (if overused)
-
Hi, is it possible that having too many reciprocal links on my website may cause damage to my SEO campaign? One of my main competitors has a page dedicated to links to other pretty relevant companies (probably around 20 in total) but is doing extremely well. Lots of other relevant websites are allowing me to link to them, in exchange for a link back. How many is too many if so? Thanks!
Helen
-
Thanks Oleg.
I have started putting together some ideas for new content etc and won't be making a links page! I will also try to avoid excessive link exchanging.
H
-
Thanks Marie, very helpful advice.
-
Hi, thanks for your reply. I think that I am getting the hang of this ( a little)!
All help appreciated.
-
Google doesn't tell us how many reciprocal links are too many, but they recently added reciprocal linking to their quality guidelines saying, ask Oleg mentioned to avoid pages that exist for this purpose: "Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")"
Some reciprocal linking is natural. As mentioned on SEOMoz before, SEOMoz has a partnership with Distilled and they routinely will link back to each other.
I would definitely avoid creating a page like you have mentioned. It could end up getting you penalized. (I recently worked with a client who had an unnatural links penalty in their webmaster tools and they had a large number of blogroll links exchanged with other sites.)
A better option would be to offer to exchange quality articles with these webmasters and in the article link back to each other's sites.
-
Building off of what Oleg said - Linking back to sites that aren't relevant to your site in any way can only be bad for your SEO campaign. My rule of thumb is to never offer reciprocal links.
There are a couple of ways to get around reciprocating links:
-
Offer to write content for their site on a topic that you are an expert on and place a link in the content
-
Create compelling content that is worth linking to in the first place so the site will want to link to you with out reciprocation.
Creating a page on your site with a bunch of spammy links will only have a negative effect on your SEO campaign. It will undermine the link building.
-
-
Tough call. In general, if used excessively, Google frown's upon it.
Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")
However, I've seen plenty of sites rank very well with just these kinds of links.
-
Link only to relevant pages that you believe supplement the purpose of your site
-
Make sure your link quantity is not unruly - if you have 300 links just thrown on a page, users trying to find a specific link will get confused. Try to add value to your links and make sure they are are manually reviewed.
If you really want to do it right, don't make a links page for the sake of reciprocal link exchanges. Instead, try to link to helpful sites naturally and ask them to reciprocate the link.
And of course, don't link to or get links from crappy sites.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Refferal links
I have a site where I can pick up where my hits came from. So if somebody clicks from another website link to visit my website, I will then pick up from which website they came from and also which page they landed on. Will google penalize me for this and see this as paid advertising?
Link Building | | Heinwest0 -
Link building
hello, my website is www.anavasis.gr and it is in Greek. Which is the best way to build backlinks? Hire a freelancer and let him making links to any site? What should i ask from a freelancer when building links for me? what should i give him like (keywords) ?. what is important to take take of? When you go to freelancer.com there are people offering backlinks for less than 100$ is that a good method? Will this help my seo? Is it a matter that my site is in Greek? thanks
Link Building | | anavasis0 -
Spam links - what would you do?
Hello, A few months back our website was hacked which we noticed quickly and got fixed. However, there still is a lot of dodgy backlinks, linking to the spam pages. They come up in Webmaster Tools, Moz and SEM rush. According to the Moz Spam tool, a few of them have been given 7 flags which Moz suggests gives a 30% chance of being penalised by Google. The website has great rankings (position 1-3 in most targeted keywords) so I am scared of doing something that will harm the rankings, however I also aware that Google may do an update which could take these spam links into account. I have no experience of using the disavow tool but from reading up about it, it should only be used as a last resort. So my question is - what would you do?
Link Building | | N2Digital0 -
Internal Linking
OSE only shows me as having 24 internal links on my home page. My internal links and total links are far less than my competitors, some of whom have 1700 on a single page. My site is www.CenterCityTeam.com and an example of a competitor with far more internal links is www.McCannTeam.com. 1) How do I get that many internal links on a page and 2) do I even want to?
Link Building | | frankdefazio0 -
Ecomerce: Would 4 link sections leak too much link juice?
Hello, In my content management for our ecomerce site, I've found that there are sometimes links to sites in our industry that have "helpful links" sections. Several strong sites link directly to these resource sections. There are 4 different topics that fit this trend in our industry. Would it leak too much link juice to make 4 comprehensive link sections and place a link to them on our "Useful Articles" page? Or should I stick to one comprehensive link section? Or perhaps a small link section? Or none at all? Thanks.
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Link quality
Hi, Having read dozens of your blogs and found them highly informative, i have to ask a question. I am kicking oout our SEO company and have taken over the SEO myself with some excellent results. Our SEO providers tell me that links from any site (irrelevent of their DA) are good, providing they are comming from a relevant source. We are in the security industry and according to MOZ, we have a DA of 52. If i can get a link to our site from another company in our industry but they have a DA of 10, is this really beneficial for me? Info i have read in Moz blogs suggest it is n ot a good idea. Please help. many thanks Daddy Smurf
Link Building | | DaddySmurf0 -
Wierd link
We have recently receive linek from one website. The site is quite very powerful for the word we try to rank, however the link is kind of wired. This is how it looks like: http://villasdiani.com/?db The webmaster of the site said that he ads (?db) on the end so as we would see on our analytics the traffic from his site.. Also the link is from footer...is this good or it does not have value
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Link Placement and Trust
Hey all I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms. When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services. Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again. Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way. Link Quality This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage). The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like: website designed by x
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture) Quality vs Quantity So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites. My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great: poorly positioned on the page domain wide narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links Content These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey). So, my question is Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy. Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort. What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback? Cheers
Marcus P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.0