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Less Excessive Link Reciprocation

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 17, 2007 in Link Building

What is the difference between a link farm and a link network? If you ask a group of search optimizers that question you’ll get a variety of answers, some more convincing than others.

Ask that question of a group of link managers and you’ll get two entirely different answers. How many professional linking services actually claim to be link farmers?

There is, in fact, no technical distinction between a network and a link farm because all link farms are link networks. However, not all link networks are link farms. In a link farm, every member site links to every other member site. It’s a crude organization and few serious link managers would propose or consider such a brutal methodology today.

Managed link networks strive to avoid the farm footprint, but there are other footprints. For example, a link circle (sometimes called a link clique) is a group of Web sites that link to each other in succession. Some people confuse link circles with Webrings. In a Webring, every site links to a server and the Webring home page. Each site is required to carry a box with “buttons” or “links” to the Webring home page, the Webring server, and a NEXT and PREVIOUS site. There may also be a RANDOM site.

In a traditional HTML-coded Webring only the service and the ring home page will derive any linking benefit from the ring. The rest of the sites are solely dependent upon the traffic that passes through the ring. However, several years ago Yahoo! bought the original Webring service and replaced the hard-coded HTML Webring code with Javascript.

Webrings are no longer as popular as they once were in Web site marketing but they may be good ways for new sites to acquire traffic. Of course, many business sites won’t carry Webring code on their pages — certainly not on their home pages (root URLs) — because they feel such code looks unprofessional. It would be better for the business sites to view the code as a resource, but then you run into irrational concerns about “losing traffic” to the ring.

You cannot lose traffic to an outbound link. You lose visitors because they are no longer interested in your site. They leave regardless of whether you give them links to other sites. Their departure is not a matter of IF but of WHEN. Your priority should be to engage every visitor who comes to your site for as long as possible with the goal of executing a transaction with them.

Popular free blogging services randomly rotate their member blogs for visitors. These types of rotating links constitute passive Webrings, where the blogs don’t have to embed any code and really have no choice about whether they’ll embed it. Passive Webrings, like the active rings I describe above, don’t pass link value but they can generate traffic and help you build much needed visibility.

Link networks come in all shapes and sizes. They can be cooperative networks, stealth networks, co-opted networks, semi-arranged networks, and lazy networks. A lazy network is the easiest to build and the most difficult to find a footprint for. What do you think the SEO value of a lazy network should be? I won’t pretend to know the definitive answer.

You build link networks more often than you think without even thinking about them. Your unintended link networks tend to be small, usually consisting of no more than 5-10 sites. A simple blogroll might be the only footprint a small link network leaves.

There are some people in the SEO community today who rush out to all the social media sites and create profiles. They link their profiles back to their Web sites and they feel like they have accomplished something. In an uncompetitive name space they may stumble into crude search reputation management but that’s about it.

Most social media profile pages don’t actually pass link value. They are even lucky to be indexed. To be indexed they need inbound links and where are those links supposed to come from? If you’re lucky the social media service will provide one or more links to your profile but the odds are heavily stacked against your profiles passing value unless you link to them first.

Your Web site should be the hub for your Web visibility. That is, if you create content on other sites, you should use your Web site to tell your visitors where to find your content. By exchanging links for visibility you carve out an equity niche on the Web where your equity is stronger than anyone else’s. You associate all the pages that are relevant to you with your Web site.

If any of those sites link to each other or to your own site then you’ve built an equity network. Equity networks are harmless, safe, and easy to build. They offer little to no search engine optimization value but they do create visibility for you. Visibility is one of the fundamental principles of SEO, however, and you should be building out at least one equity network for yourself or your business.

An equity network can serve as the foundation for a larger group of link networks that are prefectly natural. Some of those networks will be based upon reciprocal linking but the purpose of the reciprocation is not to boost your anchor text or internal PageRank.

Reciprocal linking is unavoidable. You create reciprocal links when you use trackbacks in your blogs, when you tell people where your favorite discussion forums are, when tell people about your friends’ sites, when you sign up for a friend brigade section on someone else’s site, etc. It’s almost impossible to find a profile page somewhere that doesn’t offer a link back to your Web site. Do you link out to your profile pages from your own sites? If not, then why not?

I have so many profile pages I cannot begin to link to them all, but here are a few:

1. Michael Martinez profile on TypeKey
2. The Suite101 Michael Martinez profile
3. WritersNet profile of Michael Martinez
4. Amazon’s profile for Michael Martinez
5. Yahoo! has a Michael Martinez profile
6. ezinearticles Michael Martinez profile page
7. Blogger profile for Michael Martinez
8. Profile of Michael Martinez at LinkedIn

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are forum profiles, profiles for blog reading services, more book review profiles, etc.

When it comes to worthless links, I have plenty of them. But the links aren’t so much worthless as simply not links used for manipulating search results. I’ve been called arrogant by many an anonymous poster who laughed at me for using my real name as a screen name in forums and blogs. I’m on a power trip. Egotistical. Stuck up. A great marketer.

All I ever intended was to let people know a little something about me without being pretentious or immature. Well, so much for good intentions. But it does seem that the road of good intentions is laden with social media link networks, and it’s no wonder people in this industry think that such links help something happen.

There are basically three kinds of link exchanges:

1. Low equity exchanges where a link is simply given for a link
2. Mid-equity exchanges where a link is given for content
3. High-equity exchanges where content is given for content

Now, if you’re going to give content, you can host it on your site or put it on someone else’s site. “Giving content” doesn’t have to have anything to do with contributing content to another site. I’m not talking about playing the press release or free article distribution game.

If you write a review of someone else’s site on your site, you’re giving content. I write anonymous reviews of cool sites on Xenite.Org (I call them “Xenite Cool Sites”). The anonymity lies in the fact that I don’t tell the other Web site operators I have reviewed their sites. Some of them watch their referral logs or read Xenite already and so notice the reviews.

When you create a profile on someone else’s site, you are giving content to. But a wafer thin profile that just tells people who you are, where you’re located, and lists three links isn’t much in the way of content. It may be that the profile page offers nothing more than that. When I have the time and energy, I may create a robust profile. I usually do that for sites where I know I will contribute a lot of content.

If you write a feature article for someone else’s site, you create more value by contributing a unique article to a single site and then linking to that article from your own site. By giving traffic you gain visibility. If the other site gives you a link to your site, all the better.

Of course, you could solicit an article from someone else and give them a link home. They may very well link to their article on your site. I’ve done this often and in many ways. I’ve never once been penalized by a search engine for reciprocating links. Frankly, it wouldn’t matter if I did because I get traffic from other sites more than I get traffic from search engines.

If you link out to other sites, you should link through content, especially content about those sites. Do it for your visitors, not for the hope of a link in return. By telling other people what you think of third-party Web sites you inevitably pique people’s curiosity. You draw in other links but more importantly you create content that lengthens your reach into the long tail of search.

Reciprocal link management services rely extensively upon faux directories. They don’t call these Web constructs “faux directories” but I do. The faux directories are constructed from reciprocal linking member pages, as well as from pages that the services find on the Web. They may scrape “relevant” URLs to include in your directory so that it is well-seeded (and also to mask the reciprocal links in a one-to-many ratio).

There are other ways to automate reciprocal linking but the footprint of automated reciprocal links tends to be volume. Some spammers generate tons of reciprocal links through trackbacks on blogs. That’s why many bloggers disable trackback reporting. You can also use Google and Yahoo! alerts to build reciprocal linking networks with blogs. The search engines seem to be on to that trick so I don’t recommend it by any means.

In years past before reciprocal linking became organized people used to find inbound links in one search engine and link out to them on pages crawled by another search engine. The more inbound links you had, the more often your pages were crawled, the more often your content could be updated in search engines without having to submit page URLs.

Although we don’t have to submit page URLs to search engines any more, we do need to be crawled, and unfortunately frequent crawl rates are preferable to infrequent crawl rates because the search engines now seem to treat heavily-crawled pages better than seldom-crawled pages. The lack of inbound linkage is a false signal of low community trust. The abundance of inbound linkage is equally a false signal of value and high community trust.

Link reciprocity may actually offer a means of measuring both value and trust. Reciprocation can look natural or it can look automated. I, personally, don’t trust sites that openly participate in automated linking. I try not to link to them, even if they link to me. But I have always made an exception for search engines. My distinction is arbitrary and other people have their own arbitrary distinctions.

But over the long term I feel that the best reciprocation is reciprocation based on the highest possible value, and that is not necessarily a value measured by article-for-article reciprocation. People have been doing that for years and it’s been done to death. Value is more abstract, and it should be accompanied by a link. When people strive to bundle value with links rather than bundle links with value, they cross the line from natural reciproation into excessive reciprocation.

What really matters most is the exchange of equity. Links by themselves have no equity. They are merely conduits. Too many conduits represent too little value. After all, if you had real value to offer, you wouldn’t need to engage in continuous reciprocal linkage. The real test of value is the length of time it takes you to stop building links while you build content. The less time it takes you to make that transition, the more value you provide.