SEOld School: A Give and Take

Most webmasters are intimately familiar with the process of trading links with other websites.  Chances are, if you own or administer a site, you get requests to exchange links many times each week.  While annoying and usually automated, those requests represent one of the oldest methods of SEO there is:  Reciprocal linking.

Conventional wisdom on the subject says that getting a link on a site and linking back to them directly isn’t the best way to go about getting higher search engine rankings since you’re giving up authority to get some back.  Although this is true in many cases, it’s not an absolute rule.  As a matter of fact, some of the best possible links that many eCommerce sites can hope to get are by trading with other related sites in the same or similar industries.

 When doing reciprocal linking, the proof of quality really is in the pagerank (or your preferred value metric):  You’ll notice that sites with a focused link page that only links out to other quality sites relevant to their business will almost always have a good amount of PR, even on the link page itself, which means that an exchange would be valuable to pursue.  Conversely, sites that have full link directories about every topic and will link to anyone who links back are not worth the time it takes for the exchange and are best to pass up.  In those cases, you’ll see that their link directory doesn’t have much, if any, pagerank, and most of it will be on the directory index page, with the inner pages having almost zero authority and sometimes they won’t even be cached.  So, the rule with reciprocal exchanges is simply to be very selective and choose only the best sites to exchange with.

Beyond the value issue, there’s also the question of whether you want to actively engage in proposing link exchanges to other webmasters.  There are plenty of reasons to keep this tactic in reserve, including the fact that it’s an enormously time-consuming process, especially if done correctly.  Despite the time it takes, it’s still a very cost-effective option for getting good links to your site.  There are just a few rules to make sure are followed.  The cardinal rule goes something like “don’t automate” and while it sounds less than efficient, there’s pretty much nothing more annoying than automated emails, period (except maybe unwelcome audio on websites…).  Additionally: 

• Be as polite as possible, compliment the webmaster’s site and tell them what you like about it. 
• Make sure to offer something in return for linking to your site so that they know that you’re ready to make a mutually beneficial trade and aren’t simply trying to hijack their authority for yourself.

The most common exchange offer is, of course, a reciprocal link, but in certain cases something else might be more enticing to the webmaster…  Make sure to cruise their site and see if you can come up with something like that before sending out the requests.

In the end, the success rate of sending out emails requesting link trades is pretty low, even under the best of circumstances.  However, it’s one of the best ways to get high quality, related sites to link to you without indulging in paid linking.

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Tags: Link Building, link exchange, reciprocal links, SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Link Building, Reciprocal Linking, The Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.