Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Where is the best place to put reciprocal links on our website?
-
Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website? Should we create a "Resources" page? Should the page be "hidden" from the public? I know there is a right answer out there! Thank you for your help!
Jay
-
Oops. I only just noticed the date on this question! Sorry folks...
-
Agreed. However, it might be worth adding that reciprocal links can also look natural but only if they form a small part of your link profile.
Whatever you do, Jay, dont add a page called links or resources. Make sure the links are contextual links in the content of article's or content.
My way around doing this is putting them in the testimonials pages on my sites
A good example would be when I managed to get a link from Sky.com - in return they requested a link back to their site and I would be silly not to have provided one. I didn't want the link for the juice, I wanted it for the click through's. The reason I'm saying this is to show that not all reciprocal links are seen as un-natural.
-
Good stuff....thank you for the awesome advice! I'll heed it.
-
Generally speaking, I would recommend that you do NOT copy these links from your competitor. The optimal way to use an analysis of a competitor's backlink profile is so you can copy the good links and leave the bad ones.
If you want to search your competitor's site for these links, you can try using the site: operator in Google, or perhaps the specific site's own search box.
There are forms of quality reciprocal links. They can be found on a "Resources" type of page on your site. If your site focuses on health topics you may link to the Mayo Clinic, the National Institute of Health, and other quality sites. The purpose of these links are to help your readers locate quality information. Some relevant sites may link to you as well and these links could be reciprocal which is fine.
If you have a "Resources" page where you provide links with perfect anchor text (i.e. "best real estate agent") to sites which are not relevant to yours, that is a rather obvious attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. The links you provide will offer little to no value, as well as the links you will receive. You need to give search engines a lot more credit. You are spending time and effort on what frankly amounts to bullsh*t SEO.
Investigate all your competitor's links. Look for their best links and investigate them. You want ideas, not to copy cat. The best you can do by copying your competitors is to eventually catch up to them. Provide better content, focus better keywords, be more current and relevant, be more authoritative and then you will gain links that a competitor can't copy...because the links you gain have to be earned.
-
While I generally agree with Alan above, if you're going to do recip links, I'd try to work them into the context of your site on different pages.
-
Hey Ryan. I found a bunch of links through the SEOMoz link tool analyzer that our competitors have. When I visited the link sources, all of them required a reciprocal link to be placed on our website. However, I notice that none of our competitors have a "public link page" where these reciprocals might be. Therein was my question... Jay
-
Can you share more details about these reciprocal links? What is the purpose of placing them on your site?
-
i would not get reciprocal links, Search engines look for un-natural patterns of linking, although they happan natrualy somtimes, SE's can see not only your pattern but those you have reciprocal links with.
But having said that, you are on the right track, link out on a page with low PR, include a load of links back to your own site so that you only give away a small percenatge of link juice.
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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Duplicate content on websites for multiple countries
I have a client who has a website for their U.S. based customers. They are currently adding a Canadian dealer and would like a second website with much of the same info as their current website, but with Canadian contact info etc. What is the best way to do this without creating duplicate content that will get us penalized? If we create a website at ABCcompany.com and ABCCompany.ca or something like that, will that get us around the duplicate content penalty?
Web Design | | InvoqMarketing0 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Does Google penalize duplicate website design?
Hello, We are very close to launching five new websites, all in the same business sector. Because we would like to keep our brand intact, we are looking to use the same design on all five websites. My question is, will Google penalize the sites if they have the same design? Thank you! Best regards,
Web Design | | Tiberiu
Tiberiu0 -
What is the best tool to view your page as Googlebot?
Our site was done with asp.net and a lot of scripting. I want to see what Google can see and what it can't. What is the best tool that duplicates Googlebot? I have found several but they seem old or inaccurate.
Web Design | | EcommerceSite0 -
Best Wordpress Hosting
I've had a horrible experience with the security on wordpress hosting with GoDaddy. Someone recommended Blue Host as my next option. Does anyone have any experience with BlueHost and what other hosting companies would you recommend for wordpress hosting?
Web Design | | ChristineCadena0