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
-
Is there an extra SEO benefit for linking to pages that link to you?
Currently working on a link-building strategy and have gotten a few mentions. Just curious if there is any SEO benefits of linking back to the pages my site was mentioned and linked on? Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!
Link Building | | Derrald0 -
How do I find links that link to several competitor sites?
I want to find linking pages that link to several of my competitors. Those are likely to be lists of tools I can also add my website to. My application is a dashboard tool/kanban board. So if I find a page linking both to say kanbannery.com and kanbanflow.com it will be likely to be a collection of links to kanban tools, ad my application can be relatively easy added. Magestic SEO has a "clique hunter" - is there anything similar in MOZ suite of tools?
Link Building | | kanbanchi.com0 -
Footer Links And Link Juice
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register /privacy /terms /search /sitemap /disclaimer /blog /register So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together? This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
Which Links to Disavow!
We just took over SEO for a new client who is being penalized for a bad link profile. They've asked Google to reconsider multiple times, and Google still claims that the links are bad. Because of this, and because I don't have direct access (logins, etc.) to what the former SEO did, I am considering using the disavow links tool. The most obvious links to disavow are a group of almost 1000 links that come from the same forum. However, when viewing the links on this forum they actually seem natural. People are reviewing the product (ipod cases), both negatively and positively. While this could have been an SEO tactic for link building, I don't want to disavow these links if they're not the problem, even though this domain is the source of almost all the low-quality links. Another site that has more than 200 links is Askives. Do any of you have experience with links from Askives, or removing these links? Thanks again!
Link Building | | newwhy0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Link building
I have two separate websites on different servers and was wondering that since reciprocal links effectively eliminate each other, I'm curious if this link strategy will keep the links counting. Here's the strategy: I will have someone link to my site A and if i link to their site from my site B in a three way link strategy, will the links count even though both my site A and B have me listed as the Whois so Google knows that both sites are owned by me? Or will the links be discounted as reciprocal? Thanks in advance for your feedback! Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
If I write a PR release on a site such as PRweb with anchor-text links that is picked up and published by other news sites, do the engines consider this duplicate content or additional, beneficial links?
I recently wrote a news release on PRweb that was picked up identically by 8 other news websites, with the same anchor-text links as the original. Is the reproduction of duplicate content and links across different websites like this to the benefit or detriment of SEO and ranking power? Some of the links are: http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/view/pressrelease/eventa-new-eventa-christmas-parties-website-is-launched-648923?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Alert&utm_content=pressrelease http://www.prweb.com/releases/christmasparties/neweventasite/prweb8562064.htm Many thanks!!
Link Building | | RobertHill0 -
Blog Roll Links - A good or bad thing ?
I Use Blog roll links all the time but recently they seem to be having a lower effect on listings. Is there a limit on Blog roll links you place on a blog. Internal blog roll links and external blog roll links. Also do you rename your blog roll to something such as popular links like we do ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect1