Reciprocol Links

[brandonschultz]

Am I correct in stating that linking to every article about your company is a bad idea.  I see a lot of sites with followed links to the articles that link to them.  Is this not devaluing the link?  I've been recommending removing the links or no indexing the page and no following the links.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[katemorris]

I actually think you might be thinking about it too much.

1. Are the articles written by your company about your company like guest posts? If they are and you are asked to link back by the site that posted the guest post, that is a bad link. Those will be detected.

2. Are they real articles written about the company? If so you should promote these in many ways.

3. Why is your company linking to the articles? If it's so that they can point people to what's being said about them, you don't need to remove those links. They are there for a good reason.

If you're doing the linking for your customers and potential customers, you're fine. If you're doing it for SEO purposes or to make someone happy so they will link to you, don't do it.

[Matt-Williamson]

Yes excessive reciprocal links is likely to lead your site into trouble, as it is likely to appear that you are exchanging links with these sources in turn for a link to you. How will Google decipher that the company wrote an article about your company and you are just linking to it in order to show visitors this and not an attempt at manipulating Googles SERPs?

If you work for a company that wants to acknowledge articles about your company on other sites your are going to have to come up with an alternative such as a graphic that has a logo of the sites and maybe saying we are mentioned on website x, website y and website z.

Before you think about going down the route of placing a nofollow on all links I would have a look at these wise words by Egol in a previous Q&A -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/adding-nofollow-to-all-external-links-is-this-a-good-idea

I would explain to your company why you shouldn't have all these links and the negative impact they are likely to have on your link profile. As we all know the more natural a link profile you can have the better in the eyes of Google. Saying that a natural link profile will have some reciprocal links but only a small proportion when it adds value to the visitor.

The other down side to reciprical links is that they essentially have the potential of taking the visitors attention away from your site - which in terms of business is not a great thing as this could distract them from converting to being another customer.

Hope this helps..