My mind is just racing these last few days thinking about link strategies. One thing I have been giving considerable thought to is how bad are reciprocal links really?
The facts of the matter are:
- We know that Google does not like link swapping
- We also know that a link from a high quality content page to your site (with complementary content) is a very good tool in pushing you up the search engines.
- We know that an outgoing link from your website to another with high quality complementary content also helps your website rankings.
- Finally, we know that it is your websites complete content that contributes to your overall rankings – that links to your internal pages are very important in pushing up your home page ranking.
BUT: a probing question – what is you have a link within one of your pages to another site with high quality complementary content; and that site from a different page on their site has a link to your site (not the page where you have the link to them) – are these reciprocal links?
Visually the structure is:
Are there really reciprocal links?
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i think they are still considered as reciprocal links as they are from the same domain. i aint sure.
1. Are these reciprocal links?
Definitely. The most common type are Links Page –> Homepage between two sites.
2. Google and link swapping.
It’s not that Google does not like link swapping – they actually encourage it (between ‘on theme’ sites). It’s really that you won’t gain much in terms of SEO from doing it.
3. Outbound links.
These can in fact hurt your site if done wrong. Too many from one page and it could start to enter the ‘link farm’ category. But more importantly they can disrupt the flow of PR around your own site (by leaking to external sites).
Breaking up large number of external links over a couple of ‘categories/pages’ is usually the best bet (for both SEO and usability).
Though in terms of real onsite PR flow – it often boils down to how you use the nofollow tag to direct PR in a structured pattern