Reciprocal link exchange and its big NOs.

[freetraff]

Reciprocal link exchange field is very big. And everything big has its
advantages and pitfalls; to avoid pitfalls when exchanging reciprocal
links with your online business partners it is vital to know several
big NO's of this procedure.

Do not think of automatic reciprocal link exchange as of simple link
swap, because low-value link swap will not help you with ranking and
real targeted traffic from search engine.

Your web site is your online business. Every link on your site is an
official business contact exposure. You are ready to share traffic
with this partner and you are sure that your site visitors are
strongly motivated to learn more from getting to this site. Set the
higher standards for your business, and this will push you up.

Having changed your philosophy of manual or automatic reciprocal link
exchange, pay attention to traditional traps and mistakes during link
exchange.

1. Accept all links during link exchange.

Very big mistake. Even not talking about the reputation of your site
in the eyes of professional online entrepreneurs. With time search
engines will succeed to reaching better keyword relevancy in their
searches. This means that soon it might be possible to wisely sort out
the relevant and irrelevant sites-partners on keyword base.

Relevancy proves that you care about your site visitors.

2. Look only at PR of page during link exchange.

Google PR is good for link exchange, but not more. If you see brand
fresh web site asking to exchange link with you, don't reject from PR
reasons only.

If you see that this web site can have big future, that its offer will
be interesting for the community, and this is your niche - do the
exchange.

And if the web site is good, very soon you will see your partner
ranking much better with Google.

3. Be afraid to exchange links because the leader has many links.

You are in the tough niche and see that your #1 has over 1,000 links
pointing to the site. Don't get into bottle because with good link
exchange plan you will succeed. Don't expect very fast jump in
rankings with 1,000 links competitors, but 2-3 months can be enough.

Quite often kings of the hill do not do everything possible to stay
their. You can find extra good niche for establishing business
contacts and exchange links. That would be extra traffic from more
real sites-partners, and extra links.

Don't be afraid to grow.

4. Exchange hundreds of links daily.

Making your site grow with over 100+ is risky. That is why do not jump
on the trains leading to thousands of links in days. Search engines
can de-index the web site for such bad behavior.

It is unnatural for online businesses to get thousands of value
business partners daily. That is why search engines feeling the smell
of suspicious links' growth can lose the friendly approach to your
site for violating the reasonable limits.

Invest into quality and value, not in the lump number of links.

5. Not using proper anchor text in the link.

Very sad my even today most of the people do not pay attention to the
anchor of their URL during link exchange. Anchor text (or link text or
link title sometimes) is a signal for search engines to know the niche
of this link.

If you choose proper keyword that fairly represent the major of your
niche, and put this keyword or keyphrase in the anchor, this will help
search engines to make more targeted people seeing this link.

Give new value to your links and your link will return that value many
times to your site. Use professional strategies and reciprocal link
exchange tools to bring your link exchange to new level.

[jcorkern]

# 4 is the only one i do not agree with. This is speculation or "voodoo" and has no basis of fact. If you could be de-indexed for massive link growth, then no search engine would have youtube indexed. They are now 20 months into existence and go do a backlink check on them. And most of the links are non-related.

Linking schemes or linking to a bad site is what gets your site removed from the search engines. not the rate of links. This can also be proven with the big retailers like shopzilla, amazon (remember how fast they grew)?

It is better to have related links, but all links have value, just some more than others. There are over 100 factors that determine the value of links. But all links have value. The 1 exception is a banned site, and it can only hurt you if you link to it.

hope to see all of you at the top.

[freetraff]

Until I saw one post on Matt Cutt's blog, I would think absolutely the same way you do, jcorkern. Because you are right, too many sites can get into trouble because of speed.

But Matt (deliberately or not - I don't know), unveiled the curtain. He was talking about the case when reputable service in Google's *eyes* that - here I quote - "We saw so many urls suddenly showing up ... that it triggered a flag in our system" and that was a very reputable site so that they had to manually solve the problem and they "cleared that flag" (for more details see Matt's blog post here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scoble-visiting-the-plex/)

So, if there are flags (or at least - there have been flags), it means if you are greedy - it can affect your site. Of course, if backlinks are great - with time this flag should be removen, but no one knows how much time it can take for Google staff to manually review this flagged site. And no one can guarantee that if site is still being flagged (meaning site is strange or even suspicious to Google) - that it will not affect the ranks.

We are in the fields of suggestions here, and I can't guarantee you, jcorkern, that is DOES HAVE THE GREAT INFLUENCE. But out of the facts that I mentioned I see logics. Plus my link building experience that brought my site to 1st page in Google in link niche is a side proof of some real truth in what I am saying and practising. Anything can change tomorrow in algo, but that will be tomorrow

P.S. Thanks for bringing up a very good topic, jcorkern.

[jcorkern]

that article is about migrating urls from one method to another, It is not about backlinks. I can assure you that any average webmaster will not have an aggressive link building campaign that builds fast enough to raise a red flag..

Like i said. That site is about adding a large quanity of urls. Example: www.thesite.cim/12345.htm and then www.thesite.cim/123456.htm and the subdirectories have small changes , but they are showing up in mass. This looks like a dynamic page generator to google and is a spammers or "blackhat" trick.

Believe me that you have a better chance of getting in trouble for over doing onpage than for link building as long as you are not linking to a bad site.

This is not just experience from 1 or 2 sites. I currently have over 200 seo clients. I build pretty agressive link campaigns and have yet to build too fast.

see you at the top!

[freetraff]

Exactly, jcorkern, about URLs!

But now think about it - any time you reciprocate links, you create more links on your site. Usually people have 20-50 links on one page maximum. Otherwise it's about too many outgoing links on one page - it's not a disaster, but...

With some solutions it's possible to build dozens of thousands of links (I am not talking quality, only quantity at the moment). And it means if you are splitting links into 20-50, you get hundreds of new pages in the link directory. And this is where we come to URLs.

And now the best part of it. I think more and more innovations that Google introduces into its algo will be about telling natural sites from unnatural sites. One of the factors - the speed of link building. Let's be fair - can a real site get 1000 backlinks overnight? Almost impossible: you either have to be famous marketer with huge base of people who agree to backlink or you must have some friends - top markters with huge bases or great press release (something like - time machine was invented). That's it.

So, Google in the persuit for helping natural sites and slapping on manipulators will be putting some limit. If they did it for URLs (which is funny), what can stop them from doing the same on shameless link building (which is more reasonable)?

That's why my moto is - keep looking natural and you will never have any problems with Google, because Google will never fight natural sites.

And with link building looking natural is also ok. I think up to 100 backlinks a week is more than ok to look normal.

P.S. I am not on top, just #9 for my link exchange keyword, but still not bad

[jcorkern]

the articles were about urls within its own site. not other sites. it was about massive adding of pages within its own site. It had Nothing to do with LINKS.

If you write one Great article, you can get over 1000 or even 10,000 links. Just because you get the links "overnight" does not mean that they will be found overnight by the spiders from every datacenter. so, to get 1000 links credited in 1 day or "overnight" you would need over 100,000 links in 1 day, that would not be possible by any marketer as of today

That is the difference.

[freetraff]

the articles were about urls within its own site. not other sites. it was about massive adding of pages within its own site. It had Nothing to do with LINKS.

It has. When you exchange links, you put them on your site too - I told that no one in fair mind will put over 50 outgoing link from one page (I prefer 20 links per page). Imagine you built 20,000 recips overnight (again I am talking about quantity, not relevancy, plus this number is agressive) - it means you created 20,000 links / 20 = 1,000 pages on YOUR site overnight - means you got 1,000 URLs overnight.

So, as side effect it has relation to links.

P.S. Agree on the comment about articles and backlinks.

[jcorkern]

my whole point is that the article from matt cutts had nothing to do with links, recips, one way links, or links of any kind. it only had to do with urls, adding pages and file extentions.

so trying to make a point of adding "links" too fast is still not based on facts because what you used to validate it is not even on the same topic. and i dont think he slipped. he only give away what he chooses.

I have added 2 to 3 thousand links per month to a site to beat an update on more than 20 occasions. that is agressive link growth, and they were never in trouble.

it is not like i am playing with just 1 site. there are many to base my finding on with common sense.


See you at the top

[freetraff]

Originally Posted by jcorkern

my whole point is that the article from matt cutts had nothing to do with links, recips, one way links, or links of any kind. it only had to do with urls, adding pages and file extentions.

I agree, but I showed how from this topic it can come down to the speed of link building. It's the same topic jump as industrial growth killing human beings: industrial growth is ok for everyone, but as side effect it ruins nature and it ruins our health.

So, I agree, Matt was talking about pages growth, but I explained how it is bound to link building.

Originally Posted by jcorkern

so trying to make a point of adding "links" too fast is still not based on facts because what you used to validate it is not even on the same topic.

The facts are about too fast URLs on your site, but again - I told where I see danger for link building. If you do reciprocal links, you have to build them on your site too, meaning you have to grow URLs on your site.

Originally Posted by jcorkern

I have added 2 to 3 thousand links per month to a site to beat an update on more than 20 occasions.

Can you please share more info a little about this. What kind of links you are talking about: recips, one-way backlinks (blog comments, directories, media sharing (articles and press releases))?

[jcorkern]

like you said about link pages, if you set up your directory you should have no more than 20 to 30 different cats. If you do more than this your links are not going to cary much weight because of a lack of relevence and going 30 links per page. Most sites would attain top 10 not going more than 2 pages deep per cat.

This would not be near enough ads to draw any kind of flag from any search engine.

I have blasted out 200 articles in a month for a site and this brings a lot of links to a site (and traffic ) and have done this several times.

When i worked for major online retailer we added 1000 plus links per day for 119 days without drawing a flag.

The only way you will get punished for links is recips, and that is only if you link to a bad site. This can get you in trouble quick and is the # 1 factor in going to 1 way links. There is no danger in 1 way links.

This is the reasoning for the flags for 2 many pages, there were some spammers using dynamic webpage generators for internal links with a text link pointing back to the index page. This means they were from the same ip address which is another reason it drew a flag just as matt talked about. or they had a few sites on just a few ip addresses and were generating thousands of pages with links to any specific url's home page.
This is refered to in the T.O.S. as a linking scheme and it will get you banned.

The type of sites he is talking about is sites like myspace where the profiles are dynamicaly generated for each profile, and when they see the system they clear it. Think about it. For every myspace profile there are at least 3 pages. The home page, the profile page and the blog page. this is just the main 3 pages. There are actualy about 10 or 12 pages per member. with the growth rate of myspace it would draw a flag unless it was cleared by the engineers of google and others.

Your best links will always be 1 way because of the saftey factor of not having to risk linking to a bad site. But for the most part. Recips will do the trick since most keywords for the average webmaster are not that tough to hit and there is a lack of proper seo on the competiting sites.

Hope this helps.

Jim