Does this lose link value?
-
I have a link to my site from a post on an online forum. I now want to include the forum in a blog post about good industry-related e-forums. If I link to them in this article, will I lose the value from the link on the post in their forum, and could it be seen as spammy?
-
Thanks for your responses. It would definitely be beneficial to users, so I may just get on and do it. It is a good quality link though, hence my consternation.
-
Hi Trevor,
In general no you don't lose link juice for reciprocal linking. Why? because the original practice of evaluating the value of a website factored in how many other domains were linking to it. While that is still true today many other things also factor into the ranking now. Had this not been true you would have never seen the rise of "link rings" and "link pools", and ultimately Google penalizing these sites with Panda and Penguin.
The key here is as it always should be, does X site deserve a link from you? Which means, does putting that link on your site give your users any additional value? If the answer is yes, then by all means link to it. On the other side of the coin, that website should have asked the same question about your site, does their users gain any benefit by them linking to you? You should hope the answer is yes.
If both sites benefit from the mutual link, there shouldn't be any problem. If however, as John Cross suggested it becomes a pattern, then you can suffer a penalty.
I hope that helps,
Don
-
Good question, I am not sure anyone knows the secret sauce - but in my experience It comes down to ratios... so if you have 100 back-links and all 100 of those back-links have a reverse back link - then the site would be at high risk of a penalty...
But if it is a one off then it is of little consequence. Why don't you just nofollow the reverse link?
Also no data on it, but I think google devalues the original link if you reverse it... hence we avoid like the plague... if a high quality link.
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 -
Why Links from Top Level Domains doesn't Pass Link Equity?
Hello, I have a doubt about Equity-Passing links report of OpensiteExplorer.org According to Sam Weber http://moz.com/community/users/432678 links which pass value from one page to another including followed 301 and Meta refresh links are under Equity-Passing links. I am surprising after looking at the links report generated by opensiteexplorer.org. Most of the article and directory links which have low DA and PA are under Equity-Passing links. Whereas websites like EzineArticle or Articlebase which have good DA and PA are not found in either Equity-passing links or under only nofollow category. Please suggest me if the report of Opensiteexplorer is not good enough or the links from the site like Ezine Article doesn’t pass the link equity. Thanks.
Link Building | | TopLeagueTechnologies0 -
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 -
Disavow links
I am working on an account that has had several seo companies
Link Building | | JasperSEO
over the past year so around every corner I discover something new. One the
things I have found are that majority of links to the site is coming from an
outside blog but digging deeper I found that the blog is actually on the same
server as clients. Should I disavow links from that blog or should I leave it
alone?0 -
Google Link Disavow and sites with extremely heavy but poor link metrics
Need help/opinions from the SEO's out there. I am working with a site that in the past hired an SEO company out of India. Over the course of their time together, this company submitted the clients url to tens of thousands of link exchanges and directories. Around the time of Penguin, the owners told me their inquiries dried up. Literally that same week they had a new website launched (designed by a local competitor) that really butchered the site. They were convinced the reduction in traffic/inquiries was due to the new site but I am convinced otherwise (suspect Penguin). Not only does the site need to be re-structured but their link portfolio needs to be diversified. Now on the plus side, the company caters and sponsors a number of events that earns them organic, relevant links. These are overshadowed by the tons of poor, irrelevant ones though. I read a few posts recently on the Google Link Disavow tool and to proceed slowly due to the unknown nature surrounding it. I have a good idea of what links are problematic and which ones are well served. However, the number of problematic links in my estimation is quite high (thousands). I am very hesitant to dive into Google Disavow and submit such a large number of requests. What are your thoughts? How would you proceed?
Link Building | | mattylac1 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
SEO value in Twitter bit.ly links?
When I use opensiteexplorer for my webpage www.novelaspect.com and go under the "linking domains" tab, there is only 1 Twitter link that shows up. However, my competitors have multiple Twitter links. I've posted many many times on Twitter and linked the posts back to our website, but I've always used bitly to shorten the URLs. Is this what's keeping me from getting more backlinks from Twitter (which has a high domain authority!)? I haven't been able to find a straight answer anywhere yet, so I assumed using bitly is ok. Could it also be that opensiteexplorer takes months to register links? I seem to be missing many external links...In fact, the number of external links have dropped by around 10,000 in the past 2 months, and I know I didn't remove any links. Thanks!
Link Building | | Novelaspect0 -
Building Links
Hi everyone, I am new to SEO and in the process of building links the clean way. Any suggestions on how exactly I can find websites that are linking out to quality websites already? I went thru most of my competitors link building strategy - and 90% of their links are done either thru link exchange or paid links. So looking at my competitors strategy does not really help. So I need to find websites/blogs/forums that are ready to link to me if I can show them some useful content. How do I find these websites first? Please help! Cheers! Arjun
Link Building | | ArjunRajkumar0