Why Reciprocal Linking won’t die regardless of what Matt Cutts wants.
Throughout the past couple of months there have been numerous discussions on scores of forums about “reciprocal linking.” Advanced Access, a company that sells template sites for real estate agents, had countless customers’ sites exterminated recently by Yahoo. It seems that the folks over at Yahoo were not overjoyed with AA’s nearly 40,000 sites on the same IP linking to each other.
The debate on this subject matter escalated at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago. Representatives from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK all said they are working to diminish - and in some cases punish - sites engaged in reciprocal linking schemes. I explicitly asked the panel about the present way Real Estate Agents characteristically link to one another by creating State Directories. Again, the panel members objected to such a scheme. Adam Lasnik from Google had this to say: “… in the aggregate, then that is kinda junk.” He said that if you just build a bunch of pages that don’t contribute any useful content, then they should be removed. Matt Cutts agreed saying to delete them.
So why won’t reciprocal linking die, regardless of what the search engines zealously desire? The scheme will not die because many so-called Search Engine Optimization Companies have built their entire business around link exchanges. For instance, I know of one company that claims to have 50-60 clients (see footnote) in their link exchange program each paying $500.00 per month for link exchanges. That’s a monstrous $25,000 - $30,000 in monthly revenue for having a couple of entry-level workers send out link request spam. Not bad money for the effort. Let us not overlook the website proprietors in this equation: they desire top 10 rankings for all their keywords without having to spend a large amount of money. $500 a month is cheap in comparison to the amount of money that can be earned from top search placement.
Today, we are seeing these “SEOs defend their pro link exchange positions all around the net. They say things like “It’s always worked before and it still works now. So we’re not changing just because the search engines want us to.” It is ironic that some of these SEOs were selling links a few years ago and they had the same obdurate attitude then when the search engines said to discontinue the practice. They said, “It’s always worked before and it still works now…” Sound familiar? Google banned some of their clients’ sites for the offensive link purchasing and the SEOs were thunderstruck. How can this be? What happened? Crap, how am I going to make a living now?
They found the solution…transform from “link broker” to “link exchange broker.”
As long as Reciprocal Linking is easy money for the SEOs and measured cheap by those who hire them, don’t expect to see the practice (scheme) die anytime soon… regardless of what Matt Cutts wants.
*Webster’s Dictionary defines client as one that is under the protection of another. Is it proper for anyone engaging in these practices to call their customers “clients”?
Truly informative article. I’m a bit surprised reading “Representatives from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK all said they are working to diminish - and in some cases punish - sites engaged in reciprocal linking schemes.”
Makes me wonder the method to the madness behind that.
~ Jared
August 29th, 2006 at 8:18 pmIt may be less important, but it will never go away. The cats out of the bag. As for the “seo” companies that link spam, it their days that may be numbered. If their clients keep getting banned as a result, it won’t take long before they don’t have any clients as a result. I wonder about se reps stating that they are basically going after sites that are ranking well. Time will tell.
August 31st, 2006 at 6:05 pmCharles, I agree with you that the cat is out of the bag. It is amazing though how many SEOs are in denial.
August 31st, 2006 at 6:36 pmThe article is very informative. The key issue facing real estate agents with websites IMHO - is linking to “game” the serp’s. Rather than providing useful information or resources for site visitor.
The discussion of real estate agents linking willy-nilly to each other is not really, but what is new is that the search engines are doing something about it.
However, in the real estate industry we actually do referrals to each other for clients, customers or prospects and the search engines need to recognize. For example, there are people that posted here, that I would easily refer business to. Referrals are natural part of the business and we form our referral network via state or national conventions as well as participation on a forum such as FamousAgents.
Maybe the true solution for real estate agents, is the development of individual pages for those real estate agents with worthwhile content/resources that we feel comfortable doing a referral to in the natural aspects of our business.
Gee - guess I am going towards “content” and worthwhile real estate agent resources for prospects.
What do others see for the future?
September 8th, 2006 at 8:49 amPrior to Google and PageRank, very few agents actually linked to one another. Back in 1998 and 1999 or so, it used to be a real struggle explaining to agents the value of linking.
“I’ll link to you if you link to me” is NOT a natural reciprocal link and yes, they are “kinda junk.” There are other types of links that are reciprocal and are natural. Most of the time, agent-to-agent links are not in that category.
And Jim, surely you know that all of Advanced Access sites do not, did not, and have not linked to one another. A small subset of them did, sure, but not the entire group.
September 8th, 2006 at 3:58 pmTerry Light said: “And Jim, surely you know that all of Advanced Access sites do not, did not, and have not linked to one another. A small subset of them did, sure, but not the entire group.”
That is a great point Terry. Perhaps you know the answer to this, How many of the AA site owners had reciprocal links to at least one other AA site? How many to 10, 25, 50, 100…? Also, do you know how many had subscribed to the server side include linking?
September 8th, 2006 at 4:12 pmJim said “Also, do you know how many had subscribed to the server side include linking?”
What exactly are you asking about?
I haven’t actually heard a number for how many agents had linked with other AA sites. But I do know that MANY agents had never done anything with their sites. So there wouldn’t be any links on them.
I think the biggest problem was the weekly list of agents/sites to link with. Every week you would have hundreds (or more) sites linking to these few new sites that would be in the newsletter. That might have looked automated to Yahoo, but it was all by choice of those that did the linking.
September 9th, 2006 at 1:45 pmHi Ken,
I’ll have to see if I can find an AA site with those links still on there. I really don’t know where to look because I always deleted requests from webmasters who were using it. They were not hard to spot. It was something like Links page one, page two, etc. The list those links were attached to was a sever side include.
It seemed to me (from memory) that the majority of sites I saw using that were the more “generic” AA sites.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:18 pmHi Jim,
Thanks for your insight. Over a year ago I predicted that non-natural linking such as indescriminant reciprocal linking is dead but it needs booed and laughed out of several forums for such an “outrageous” analysis, after all how who was I to say such a thing. I also predicted that those who were feverently pushing recip linking would say “I knew that all along.” SEOs are marketers not analysts and as you so rightly pointed out “As long as Reciprocal Linking is easy money for the SEOs… don’t expect to see the practice (scheme) die anytime soon… regardless of what Matt Cutts wants.”
September 11th, 2006 at 5:12 pmThink I know the pages you are talking about. They where for the marketing package clients, but they where not server side as far I can remember.
September 12th, 2006 at 4:48 pm