Google holds you 100% responsible for everything on your site and the places you link to. If your site is filling a need, has great content and is engaging, it will develop backlinks on it's own from the right places. If your site is freshly built and acquiring backlinks fastly in a method of reciprocal link trading, it will be sniffed out in a heart beat. Once again, you should not be afraid to link out, but know who and what you are linking to. Not all reciprocal links are bad as well. To get a little more clarity on the continuum of link exchange riskiness, check out the most recent offering by Ranf Fishkin. he breaks down from white hat to black hat.
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Death Of Reciprocal Link Trading
It has long been somewhat of a practice of finding sites related to yours and exchanging links with the other site owners to increase ranking and build traffic. It has gone on forever, but now I am afraid that is coming to an end. As Google gets smarter on tracking unnatural backlink building strategies, related sites or not, that practice is officially in the gray hat area of link building. Look at from what Google sees. If two sites in a small window of time have backlinks pop up on site linking to each other, what are they to believe? Especially if it were to happen on a link partner page and not in the course of content page or blog post. Does this mean you should not link to someone who links to you naturally? Of course not, but it should happen in a course that is natural and make damn sure that the site or page you are linking to passes the mustard. Remember that you are who you link to. You may find something on the site that is useful after discovering that the site is indeed linking to you, but use your common sense in doing so.
Google holds you 100% responsible for everything on your site and the places you link to. If your site is filling a need, has great content and is engaging, it will develop backlinks on it's own from the right places. If your site is freshly built and acquiring backlinks fastly in a method of reciprocal link trading, it will be sniffed out in a heart beat. Once again, you should not be afraid to link out, but know who and what you are linking to. Not all reciprocal links are bad as well. To get a little more clarity on the continuum of link exchange riskiness, check out the most recent offering by Ranf Fishkin. he breaks down from white hat to black hat.
Google holds you 100% responsible for everything on your site and the places you link to. If your site is filling a need, has great content and is engaging, it will develop backlinks on it's own from the right places. If your site is freshly built and acquiring backlinks fastly in a method of reciprocal link trading, it will be sniffed out in a heart beat. Once again, you should not be afraid to link out, but know who and what you are linking to. Not all reciprocal links are bad as well. To get a little more clarity on the continuum of link exchange riskiness, check out the most recent offering by Ranf Fishkin. he breaks down from white hat to black hat.
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2 comments:
Without a doubt I think time between links is playing a bigger role now than ever. This goes for 1-way, reciprocal, etc. Just consider time as a factor when starting a link building campaign.
In the future I even see this as affecting viral content. The actual links won't be nearly as valuable to a long term game plan as they once were.
what a blatant load of misinformation. who died and made rand fishkin god?
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