Reciprocal Links - Important Changes You Need To Know About
By Kerry Thomas
Reciprocal linking has offered webmasters an effective technique for gaining traffic for years now. Right now, it seems that reciprocal linking is falling out of favor with Google's ranking algorithms. Why? Well the answer to that is most likely due to the sheer number of automated link building programs out and about.
Not to say that link building programs are bad...in my opinion we are simply at the point where it is obvious that this sort of linking arrangement is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate the search engines.
The mission of most search engines is to develop a useful platform that returns the most relevant and content rich material to the user. Let's face it we have been operating in an environment where webmasters will link to sites that are not exactly relevant to their site-- the automated linking systems out there have contributed to this situation.
Consider the following example: web site A is a site built as a children's story resource. Now everything may seem fine and dandy until we look at that site's outgoing links and there we find a link to web site B which is a web site selling sexually explicit material. I think most reasonable people would have to draw the conclusion that if a visitor on web site A was looking for children's stories then a so called resource link pointing to web site B would definitely not be relevant to their search.
The example above simply illustrates that reciprocal linking has become so bloated and hyped up that webmasters--particularly the novices--are striving to just grab links. When this sort of link exchanging occurs then we meet with the obvious--The links are not relevant to the content within the pages.
Where does all of this leave us as webmasters? We're exactly where we have always been-adapting to the changes at hand. Google appears to be taking the lead in addressing the reciprocal linking issue--there are several changes out there right now that webmasters need to consider.
If you have reciprocal links with others you may want to be on the look out for the "nofollow" attribute that can be added to the anchor tag in your HTML. This allows webmasters to essentially tell Google to ignore that link and not include it in ranking the page.
How does this affect the reciprocal linking arrangement? If your link exchange partner includes this "nofollow" attribute to the anchor tag in your return link, then they have effectively stopped the Googlebot from following the link to your site. If the page was helping your rankings, you can now expect them to plummet.
The key thing to remember here is that your link will still be visible on the site and will still work...it is just no longer helping you with your rankings. So, if you manually check your backlinks, you may not notice that there is a "nofollow" attribute controlling the link. If you check your backlinks via automated means, then be advised that the script doing the check may not detect the "nofollow" attribute.
What's on the horizon? I think we are going to see a lot of "swapping and dropping" as webmasters adjust to Google's changes. It's going to get interesting to see how these changes affect the link exchanging strategies that are now used. Are you prepared?
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