Reciprocal Links and nofollow/noindex/robots.txt

[AnthonyMangia]

Hypothetical Situations:

1. You get a guest post on another blog and it offers a great link back to your website.  You want to tell your readers about it, but linking the post will turn that link into a reciprocal link instead of a one way link, which presumably has more value.  Should you nofollow your link to the guest post?

My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that if it's good for users, the link belongs there, and as such there is no trouble with linking to the post.  Is this the right way to think about it?  Would grey hats agree?

2. You're working for a small local business and you want to explore some reciprocal link opportunities with other companies in your niche using a "links" page you created on your domain.  You decide to get sneaky and either noindex your links page, block the links page with robots.txt, or nofollow the links on the page.  What is the best practice?

My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that this would be a sneaky practice, and could lead to bad blood with the people you're exchanging links with.  Would these tactics even be effective in turning a reciprocal link into a one-way link if you could overlook the potential immorality of the practice?  Would grey hats agree?

[DanCrean]

1. Yes, your link back to the other site is in good faith and good for readers.  If you don't do it too much, you shouldn't get dinged for recip linking.

2. About 4 or 5 years ago I used to see sites do this, usually using the robots.txt file to exclude spidering ot their links page.  i don't know if it;'s the "best practice" but it seems robots,txt was used more often than noindex on the page.

It's a sleazy thing to do and yes, it can cause bad blood with your link partners.  I know because on more than one occasion I informed sites about that practice being used on them, and they removed their outbound links and thanked me for pointing out how they were being played for chumps.

[AnthonyMangia]

Thanks, Ryan.  I appreciate the answers, especially for the second question.  Link exchanges aren't really my style as far as link building is concerned, but it kind of popped into my head as a result of the first question, so I figured I'd throw it out there.  Thanks for the responses!

[RyanKent]

Hi Anthony.

Your first question asks how to inform your site's readers about a blog article you created on another site, without negatively impacting the link juice you are receiving from the article (i.e. creating a reciprocal link).

One possibility is mentioning the article without linking to it. "Check out my article on Grey Hat SEO at the SEOmoz site". Another method along the same lines is to use this same practice and specifically mention the article without linking to it: http://www.seomoz.org/grey-hat-seo (fictitious link). Since there is no actual link, you do not need to add nofollow and no link juice is lost.

You can also tweet the link or post it on facebook or another social sharing site. If you show your tweets on your site, this tactic would not be as productive due to the reciprocal link which you were trying to avoid being created.

You can also get creative: "Check out my new article on Grey Hat SEO tactics. It ranks #1 in Google! Click here to see" and then you provide a link to Google which shows the search results. Your reader would presumably click that result and you not only send the user to your article, but also send some positive signals to Google at the same time.

As for your second question, "How can I backstab my linking partners and get away with it?", blocking the page with robots.txt would work, but it disrupts the flow of link juice throughout your site. Adding the noindex tag to the page is preferable but also more obvious to your linking partners. Adding the nofollow tag to all the links will cost you a lot of link juice. Another method would be to present the links in a properly constructed iframe which Google does not crawl. May I just add I hate strongly dislike this type of question?