How many levels deep is a good recip link?

Hi,

I'm wondering what everyone looks for with the return links they get from their link exchange partners?

For instance, if my resource page is 1 click from my homepage, and the link I give my partners is 1 click from my resource page, I would consider that link to be 2 levels deep - or 2 clicks from the homepage.

What does everyone think is the maximum acceptable level of clicks away from the recip link partners home page that your link should appear on?

Originally Posted by Las Vegas Hi, I'm wondering what everyone looks for with the return links they get from their link exchange partners? For instance, if my resource page is 1 click from my homepage, and the link I give my partners is 1 click from my resource page, I would consider that link to be 2 levels deep - or 2 clicks from the homepage. What does everyone think is the maximum acceptable level of clicks away from the recip link partners home page that your link should appear on?

The theory once was that external links would pass some of the PR from the donor page. Example: a PR 5 with one external link would pass most of its PR, likely a PR4 to its target page. The amount of PR passed is a reverse relationship to the number of links on that particular page. Whether still in effect is debatable. Let's take it step further. If your main page is a PR5, 1st level navigation to internal pages is likely to be PR4, and navigation for the 2nd page to 3rd pages is likely to be PR3. I say likely because other factors are involved. Now let's imagine that you have 60 external links on the 3rd page which has a PR3. According to the theory (no direct evidence) the amount of PR passed to external links would be on the order of 1/60 of available PR. Not every comforting.

My opinion of what actually happens. Relevant content on both the donor site and donor page along with the nature and number of the external links are the important factors. For example, if you have a page to page reciprocal link on beach front property and both the donor and target page have semantically relevant content the link will be much more valuable than a link from a state directory page.

Now for a thought about semantic content. I have a site for a university on green living. The site has a PR4 but several of the internal pages are PR5. The first PR5 on the site that I noticed was a simple list of experts in the field, no other content. Implication: It may pay to quote the experts.

[Jim Messenger]

It really depends on the site. Links from most sites are probably worthless at the the third level. However, if a sites homepage has a really high PR and the site architecture distributes the PR efficiently then a link might be valuable at 7 levels deep.

Here is another twist in the scenario. If I have a page that is ten levels deep and has 1000 one way links pointing at it, would you want a link on that page?

So my short answer to your question is, "It depends".


-Jim

P.S. I would gladly take a link 7 levels deep from Adobe, Google, MIT, or Nasa.gov

[kensmith]

In general I think that anything over 2 clicks from the homepage for an average real estate site will have little or no value. Actually for many sites even 2 levels deep is to much as the pages aren't indexed.