Why Does Massive Reciprocal Linking Still Work?
-
It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time.
I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally.
My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)?
I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful?
How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?
-
The SEO industry in general likes to "move along" whenever they catch wind that Google has cracked down on something. This is a mistake, though. Google may use X algorithm to find sites that are employing Y strategy. IE, for reciprocal links Google targeted large sprawling partner pages, not just whether or not two domains linked to one another. You could still succeed with merely a different method of placing the reciprocal links...
That being said, I would never tell you that blog roll links don't work, I would merely tell you to use those strategies on sites that are less important in the long roll.
But, of course, I would probably tell you to use just about any and every strategy, as long as you divide those strategies across sites so as to minimize risk.
-
Thanks for the response. I'm very confident that these strategies are working. Already experimenting with secondary sites.
I'm less frustrated by the effectiveness of these strategies, and more curious as to why the SEO community generally disregards them as ineffective.
While I appreciate that "white hat seos" don't advocate "gray / black hat" techniques, it seems that they must at least acknowledge that they are still largely working.
-
Good questions...
1. First, it is difficult to prove that the techniques you notice competitors using are actually responsible for their rankings. I know it is frustrating to stomach, but the easy-to-detect stuff is generally ignored by Google. Chances are, your competitors are getting something right other than simply relying on the one strategy you easily see.
2. The general response to reciprocal link strategies was to devalue gigantic link directories created on individual sites. You know, these sprawling "partner" sections. This update probably has little to no impact on other reciprocal strategies such as blog-roll exchange.
I guess my bigger question is this - if you are certain these strategies are working, but are afraid they may end up with penalties, why not create a secondary site and start using them? It costs $9.95 a year for another domain. Wordpress is free. You can get hosting for it at $5/mo. It is time to start a multi-site strategy and play some hardball. Divide. And. Conquer.
Keynes said it best, in the long run we are all dead. With multi-site strategy, you can keep your long-run horse in the race, but run every dirty tactic you like on churn-and-burn sites you don't care about.
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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
Is a Link Wheel Safe If I Control the Wheel?
Hi, folks. Our company operates over 50 disease-specific, nice websites. Currently, we're building resource/landing pages for some therapies and other related topics. One experimental therapy is being investigated across four different disease types: cystic fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Hemophilia, and cancers. We have sites for all of them, and have created original landing pages for each site. Question: is it safe / does it make sense to "link wheel" these pages, especially since the wheel is composed of all our own sites? The other option of course is to simply interlink all of them, but will I get more visibility with a cyclical linking scheme? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Michael_Nace1 -
Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?
Hello, We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building. They claim to only target industry-relevant, high authority sources. I am very skeptical of this tactic but they are a fairly reputable agency and claim this is safe and works for their other clients. They sent a broadly written (but not trash) article, as well as a short list of places they would syndicate the article on, such as issuu.com and scribd.com. These are high authority sites and I don't believe I've heard of any algo updates targeting them. Regarding linking, they said they usually put them in article descriptions and company bylines, using branded exact and partial matches; so the anchor text contains exact or partial keywords but also contains our brand name. Lately, I have been under the impression that the only "safe" links that have been manually built, such as these, should be either branded or simply your site's URL. Does anyone still use article syndication as a form of link building with success? Do you see any red flags here? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David_Veldt0 -
How should I use the 2nd link if a site allows 2 in the body of a guest post?
I've been doing some guest posting, and some sites allow one link, others allow more. I'm worried I might be getting too many guest posts with multiple links. I'd appreciate your thoughts on the following: 1. If there are 50+ guest posts going to my website (posted over the span of several months), each with 2 links pointing back only to my site is that too much of a pattern? How would you use the 2nd link in a guest post if not to link to your own site? 2. Does linking to .edu or .gov in the guest post make the post more valuable in terms of SEO? Some people recommend using the 2nd link to do this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Sure, but what about non-keyword rich anchor text links?
Could spammy non-keyword rich anchor text liks help your website rank? Of course, there's been a lot of discussion around Google's update of its link scheme. Specifically, they target press releases with do-follow links on keyword-rich anchor text and "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links". Well, that leaves the question unanswered, what if you're doing these spammy linking techniques, but on non-keyword rich anchor text, such as "click here", "find information", and "click here". Will you still get smacked down by Google then? Given that links on non-keyword anchor text can still help increase domain authority, it seems like Google left a door open here for large scale publication of a certain class of spammy links that can still assist rank, no? Also, in answering, please distinguish between best practice, and effective. For instance, purchasing links isn't a good practice, but it can still be an effective technique. While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Links from automated translations can damage the source?
I've a website dataprix.net composed by automated translations in diferent languages from original contents from another website, dataprix.com. Is good for dataprix.com to be linked by the contents of dataprix.net as the source of translated content, or could be considered by Google as a lot of low quality links and result on penalties for dataprix.com?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xiruca0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0 -
Feedback on link building idea
We came up with this idea at work for a client but before I initiate it I was wanting to get feedback on if this would be considered whitehat and alright to use. It is for an ecommerce site. On the order confirmation and thank you page (not email cause they are on some old system that does not send out emails) we are wanting to put a thank you for your order message and continue with a statement about how they can save money on future purchases with a link that takes them to a page with info on how to do so. That new page will have info about linking to the site from a blog or website. And will say if you link back to us and send us an email with that link as proof we will give you a promo code for your next purchase. Is this alright?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webfeatseo0