Reciprocal linking - does it work? Internet Marketing for Internet Retail : The Preston Blog

Reciprocal linking - does it work?

Filed under: marketing |

In building an internet marketing campaign, every marketer knows that it’s important to have links to their page to guarantee indexing by the search engines and a higher page rank (which will move your company up higher in the natural results for Google).

The question for most marketers is whether to buy inbound-only links or use reciprocal links, which are free. Like anything else on the internet, you probably want a mixed strategy if you want to achieve the best results. However, I have been impressed with how a little bit of reciprocal linking helped PlainAdvice achieve a PR of 3 in just two months live. Also, the site is consistently reindexed every single day.

First of all, it’s important to understand the difference between each - if you link to another site and they link to you, Google is going to give you some credit for that reciprocal link. However, if you don’t link to another website, but they link to you, Google will assume that you are more important and you will get more credit for that link than a reciprocal link. So they both help you, but an inbound-only link is obviously better to have. For this reason, high page-ranked sites sell their links and they can be quite expensive.

The main disadvantage of reciprocal links is that you will need to have a page (or a few) with a ton of links to other sites. If you can find some really relevant companies to swap links with, this isn’t a problem at all (and the search engine will give you more credit for relevant links). But if you have a hodgepodge site like PlainAdvice, you might just have a few pages chock full of links, some relevant some not. Check out the link page to see what I’m talking about. While a page like this may not work for a retailer, for a purely informational site like PlainAdvice, it’s fine.

So how do you find people who want to swap links? You can approach people directly and ask them, but this would take a lot of time and a lot of rejection. I have had a few people call at work over the past few years asking if we wanted to swap, but it just didn’t make sense for us because as a retailer that pays for each visitor on our site, we don’t want to send people anywhere else when we finally get them on our page.

The best tool I have found for link-swapping is LinkMarket. You can sign up for free and search for relevant sites. Then you can request a link, and if they approve it, you will both be linking to each other. I was pretty skeptical of it at first, but decided I would give it a shot because it’s free. However, when I look at the number of links to my site on yahoo (linkdomain:plainadvice.com), I see a number of those sites linking to me. (Note: the command to check backwards links on google is link:plainadvice.com, but from my experience they usually show about 20% of the links that yahoo shows).

So if you want a really clean site, you probably want to check with a link broker and buy inbound-only links, but if you just want to get your site quickly indexed and start building a decent page rank that won’t require a monthly fee (like most inbound links do), you are better off using a link exchange such as linkmarket.

3:03 pm