Reciprocal / Trading Links Strategy – How to Use It

May 21, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Advice, SEO Tips 

A popular way of getting links pointing to your website is to trade links with someone.  This is also called “reciprocal linking” or “swapping links”.

Website owners, especially new website owners, tend to turn to this kind of linking strategy to help get them indexed in search engines or to just simply start gathering up links that point to their website.  While this used to be a relatively decent way of gathering incoming links not too long ago, the value of trading links with someone today has diminished.

If someone requests to “trade links” with you, they’re essentially saying “If you put my website link on your site, I’ll put your link on mine.”

For example, if you have a website that talks about landscaping and you’d like to get more links pointing to that site, you’d do some searches in Google or whatever search engine you choose to find other sites related to your topic of landscaping.

You might find sites on plowing gardens, growing flowers, organic gardening, plants, etc.  You would then contact each of these sites and see if they’d be willing to link to you if you in turn linked to them.

Given all of the additional linking strategies you can use, reciprocal linking should be one of your last resorts to gathering links.  That being said, it can still be an effective strategy so long as you keep your reciprocal links to a small percentage of actual links to your site.

Here are some tips to follow:

  1. Keep your reciprocal links to a small percentage of overall links coming to your site.  If you currently have 100 links pointing to your site, make sure that only around 10 or less of those are reciprocal.
  2. Keep any reciprocal linking strategy on-topic.  Don’t link just for the sake of linking, make sure that whomever you decide to trade links with that their site is on a related topic that would be beneficial to your site visitors.
  3. Be sure the site you want to trade links with has some kind of PageRank.  Obviously, the higher the better but any kind of PageRank at all means that the site has been around long enough to receive visits from Google.
  4. Don’t start off your linking strategy by trading links with other sites.  Instead work first on getting one-way links and then blend in a reciprocal linking strategy.
  5. If you do find a site you’d be willing to trade links with, look first to see if they have a spot where you can submit your site first.  If so, see where your link will be located.  If you’re link will be listed on a page that houses dozens of other links or worse still, is a page called “links”, you’d do your site well by looking for another site to trade links with.  Oftentimes pages labeled “links” or pages that consist of dozens of links don’t fare well in the search engines and thus won’t do you much good.
  6. Contact the site owner of a site you want to trade links with and ask if you can get a link on one of their interior pages, preferably all by yourself or at least with few links already contained within it.

All in all, reciprocal linking isn’t inherently “bad” but it shouldn’t be your first choice when trying to gather incoming links.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • bodytext
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • MisterWong
  • Netvouz
  • NewsVine
  • Propeller
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

Related posts:

  1. How do you get those extra links in Google?
  2. Using Hidden Text & Links On Your Web Pages
  3. SEO Tips – 25 of Them…
  4. Link Building for Bing
  5. PageRank Is NOT The Be-All-End-All

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Get on the Newsletter list where you get free & early access to all SEO Tips & Techniques...

Comments

Comments are closed.