I am not the kind of person to ‘out’ a site because of poor or manipulative SEO practices. Like many others I come across sites that spam, cloak and use all kinds of unethical tactics and simply carry on, however there is something I need to highlight today, something that is annoying but could also be dangerous for an unsuspecting webmaster.

Like many others I receive the usual spam ‘link exchange’ request, something along these lines;

I reviewing your website I found that your website is good match with my site service relevant (IT, SEO) so I want to back link on your site. Please add my link, detail as below:

This was an actual email I received and I doubt the person sending it even looked through my site, because if they had have done they would have quickly realised there efforts are worthless and potentially dangerous.

…If your thinking, ‘Tim, everyone get’s spammed. deal with it and stop moaning’ your right, however I have a major issue with what the spam email was requesting, but let’s break this down a little.

Low value link

I am not going to link back to the site responsible but I am going to highlight the sites they were willing to give me a link from.

OK they wanted a fully anchored link from my PR3 page which has thousands of relevant links pointing at it, this would seriously boost their SEO efforts. In return they were willing to give me links from pages like;

This one

and

This one

Now you will notice these pages are filled with external links, to other reciprocal link partners they have swapped links with. A link from a page like this offers no value to your site, so you will be giving them a valuable link in return for nothing.

Notice how I no followed the links? There is a reason for this…..

Link Farm

The above pages are basically link farms, lots of links pointing to various pages that have all been created artificially to increase rank.

It was only a year or two ago when the real estate webmasters were hit for this exact same link building method, see my post on reciprocal linking.

Google Penalty

So if we exchange links and receive a link from a page that will pass no link juice, no pagerank and no real value at all, we are also risking been associated with a link farm.

This can result in a penalty, however even if you escape the penalty the strength of your links could still be devalued in some way. So by agreeing to a request like this could actually damage your own site.

Reason for the Rant

The reason I am going on about this is because an unsuspecting webmaster, eager for a link, could quite easily fall into a trap like this. Someone who is not savvy to the way the search engines work may find themselves penalised and have no clue why.

I think the most disappointing thing about this from my point of view is that the request came from another SEO company. Is it any wonder SEO get’s such bad press?? They clearly use this tactic to build links to their clients websites, it’s poor to say the least.

Anyway the purpose of this post was simple, if your considering complying to a link exchange request make sure the page your getting a link from gives you as much as your giving and do not get involved with webmasters offering these types of unethical links. It may work for them today but I can almost guarantee you that the search engines will be on top of it tomorrow.

If by any chance the person that sent me the email is reading this, please stop spamming and please use link building methods that are beneficial to all

Thanks for reading.

A few of my recent posts have put a somewhat negative light on reciprocal linking and in today’s post I wanted to fully explain my position on reciprocal links.

There are Lot’s of ideas on reciprocal linking some of them are fine others can actually cause your site to be penalised, let me run through the 3 main types of reciprocal links…Starting with the BAD.

The BAD

These are the type of links that caused all the real estate problems back in 2007/08. Site owners were contacting other real estate site owners in different parts of the country and offering to exchange links and  using anchor text for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank.

So they did this by creating a links page on their sites and sent a link to the homepage of the reciprocal site. The Reciprocal site would then return the favour from their links page.

It looked a little something like this;

Now these link pages could sometimes have hundreds of links on them and it did not take long for the search engines to figure them out. The links were quickly devalued and the sites lost their rank.

If you have a links resources page on your site, don’t panic. As long as your not using it to create a reciprocal directory then it is natural.

This type of linking is set up for the prime purpose of manipulating the search results and PageRank algorithm, my advice would be to stay well away as it is not uncommon for sites to receive penalties for it.

The UGLY

I’m sure people are not going to like me for what I’m about to say but this is my opinion based on personal experiences.

Reciprocal links to directories, including blog directories are plain ugly and will pass little if any real value to a site. This also includes mass blogroll lists.

Now before you simply click the back button, hear me out.

If you have reasonable amount of these links it is going to make no difference however if you find your homepage has over 30 of these types of links your site may start to suffer. I have not seen sites penalised for this sort of linking but have seen link juice completely run dry.

Let’s think about this logically;

Does the above link profile look natural to you? Remember what Google wants is to award links based on credit worthy content. If your linking to loads of exchange directories or to a long list of blogging friends, these are not awarded based on quality content, they’re based on relationships.

Your blogging buddies may have quality content on their sites/blogs, but why are you exchanging links? If it’s based purely on a relationship this is not something Google will want to use to base their rankings on.

Again I will say there is nothing wrong with a hand full of these types of links, but having a long reciprocal link list in your side bar is simply ugly and will do you no favours in the search engines.

The GOOD

Finally the good, the way reciprocal links can work and pass real benefits to your site.

If you come across content that is highly relevant and similar to something on your own site you may want to link to it, you may also want to send a link to the homepage of the site that published the content. YOU MAY…. even want to contact the site owner and say

“hey loved that article you have published, I published something on my site that backs up your opinion, you may want to link to it”.

This could result in a link pattern like so;

This type of linking is perfectly legitimate because it is natural and the links have been awarded based on quality, relevant content.

If a manual review was to take place the above linking pattern would not stand out at all, where as the other two would stand out like sore thumbs!

So if your thinking about a link exchange ask yourself the following questions;

• Am I exchanging to point my readers to a useful, relevant resource?
• Will I still award a link even if I don’t get one back?
• Is the page the link is pointing to a relevant quality resource?

If you can answer yes to them all your on the right track.

Once again, thanks for reading.