The Death Of Reciprocal Links

Hi Patrick,
yes I do actively pursue links and exchange with theme related relevant sites, i.e. sites that are not packed with 3rd party adds, but legitimate businesses. In a recent post I outlined my approach:

http://blog.achille.name/2006/08/07/link-exchange-how-to-build-your-directory-of-networked-sites/

The point being that links can still be a great way to drive traffic to a web site, it all depends on how you approach the problem – this is my experience of course

In my post I make a point of building a directory and attracting prospect link partners that scan the web in search of other web sites to team up with.

This approach has made it much easier to build the links that can otherwise be very very difficult, frustrating, and time consuming, depending on type of products or services being promoted.

I would love to hear what you and the other readers of linkbuilding have to say re. my approach.

Cheers,

Sante

Most of the link exchange emails I receive are nonsense and full of spelling mistakes. As long as you take time to send a proper email to the webmaster then the success rate should be quite good.

I agree with mad4. As soon as I see bad grammer or spelling mistakes, I hit delete. I do the occasionaly mailing, and I’d say I get a 5%-10% response for link exchanges, though I have probably sent out less than 400-500 emails over the past 2 years for link exchanges.

I pretty much stopped making requests. I get so much link exchange requests from crappy, spammy sites, that I usually don’t bother reading them anymore.

A reciprocal linking campaign is like anything else: you can do it well, or do it poorly.

If you know and network with other webmasters in your niche, and if you make your website the kind of authoritative site that other webmasters actually want a link from, then you should be able to see fine results from a link exchange campaign.

On the other hand, launch a banner farm that has no chance of ever getting a Yahoo or DMOZ listing and then send a form email to 100 webmasters you’ve never met, and you’ll get horrible response rates.

I use link manager to obtain links and I was able to obtain around 1000 links and thought any link was a good link to have. Wrong, out of the 1000 links google only gave me some credit for 100 of them and in fact I think the other ones hurt my SEO. I’ve since deleted all but a 100 of the links that fit my business model. I hope that will help me out with the big three.

Yes, irrelevant and spammy reciprocal links have been heavily devalued. This does not surprise me because they are some of the easiest links to evaluate using a spider and a database. What I have found is that laser targeted reciprocal links, i.e. links to quality sites that have a sizable word cloud overlap, still work quite well.

On another note, back in the ole days, before the World Wide Web, we did not worry much about spelling and grammar in our emails. In fact, good manners of that sort tended to mark you as an outsider and raise questions about character. That obviously changed a while ago and there is no going back.

I used to do reciprocals, not anymore. Most requests I receive are spam and have nothing to do with my website. The success rate when I did these were too low to keep trying and most of these links get tossed into “Links” pages with hundreds of outbound links. You get nothing out of them.

Personally, I don’t bother. For the time it takes to write out decent emails, find the sites and track the responses it’s just not worth it. My time is more valuable than that, I can spend it doing something else that makes me money.

You should try to make friends with other webmasters in your niche. I have got tons of links that way. One big site owner might know may others in that niche and if you send them an email saying “Mike sent me” for example they’re more likely to hook you up with a link.

It’s not totally dead yet, but it is a 90 year old in a hospital being kept alive by a respirator.

Generally speaking now I don’t request links, but I do occasionally get legitimate requests to exchange them, but usually from a broader group of people I know across the place.

A quick side note…is it only me who thinks it odd that you guys are tagging comments here link=nofollow when you’re in the link sales business?

Hey Duncan, good call That function is actually baked in to Typepad so is not something we “turned on”. That being said it’s not the worst idea for blog comments as some of our posts have been hijacked pretty good by some automated spam. Thx!

I used to actively pursue reciprocal links, but I stopped in 2005.

Now, I’ve gone back to what I used to do before Google started ranking pages by links.

If I see a site I like, I blog about it or add it to a directory on one of my sites. Sometimes I email the webmaster and let him/her know, sometimes I don’t.

I think this is more like the organic growth we saw in the web before everyone was trying every scammy or spammy way to build links.

I just signed up as a Text Link Ads affiliate because I think this is a better way for legitimate sites to get links. Links plus advertising sounds like a good deal to me.

I get lots of reciprocal link requests and most are deleted. In less than one percent of the cases, I’ll link to the site because I like the content, with no regard for getting a back link or not.

All the best,

JD

Why are people going so against reciprocal links now? Are people in some weird niches that I’m not in? I send out about 50 links every other week for exchanging on main pages of my site and usually the return number is around 5-10 sites, which usually ends up being too much for me. Once my return rate for recip. links was over 50%.

I’m sure my niche is rare in this though, video/pc game sites.

I assume flash arcade sites work in the same way as video/pc game sites with very easy recip linking, but video/pc game sites are usually of quality content and linking.

What niches are people in?

Hehe, oh yeah, how people keep on saying just make the best site on the internet and you get links…lol try doing that for video/pc game sites without spending thousands upon thousands on your site .

I have never really been a fan of this type of linking. Its not part of my slotted link building time and activity that I do every month. Rarely do I accept requests to link this way [site is a complement and will help my users, no adsense, is not spammy, etc], mostly because of the low response rate, i.e., I can spend my time doing other things in regards to linking that yield better results.

I used to do link exchanges about two years ago and it worked very well.

BUt the amount of time i spent doing it was way too much, i would have been better creating really good content instead.

Every time I receive a “reciprocal link exchange request” I do look at the site. If I see that it’s relevant, I would be more interested in paying them for a link instead of exchanging links.

Reciprocals are now devalued … unless they are being built the way Blogs build them … within articles. Any other way seems useless to me. UNLESS it’s a JOINT VENTURE where you pursue these links for the benefit of the bottom line and not SEO.

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I’ve tried reciprocal links, but never had too much success. On the other hand, organic growth from linking to other websites that I personally find interesting has been very successful.

I use Brad Callen’s “Link Metro” which makes it easy for reciprocal exchanges and you can restrict the usual spammy sites. Visitor numbers are up as a result

On my sites that matter no link exchange at all. In fact no link building either, all I do is crosslink my sites if they are related to breath life into them. After the first initial breath they do fine on their:

1. quality
2. accuracy
3. compliance
4. trust

Works for me!

I think link exchanges *can* work. I have a few myself right now, but I mainly do them for traffic exchanges. I try not to do any link exchanges for pagerank benefit anymore because they can be unreliable and it’s hard to keep track of how many outbounds a specific site has.

I build up my PageRank through other sources, mainly directories and natural linkbacks. Sometimes I’ll ask non-prof sites to link back to me or things of that nature. Often it will work. But overall, I try to stay away from link exchanges so I don’t have to keep monitoring the link to make sure it’s active still. I’ve had a few link exchanges where they just stopped linking to me for no reason and gave no explanation, which prompted me to move away from link exchanges.

We still have dedicated servers, scrapers, 10 people adding links night and day. Not really dead, once you have trust any link will do.

I think simple link exchange the old way is no longer working… there are better approaches on the web now days .. I think one of them is doing grammatical, meaningful and contextual links within the contentâs context across different content areas, documents, pages etc.; there are sites that do that already, check on Google for âcontextual linksâ or âfree contextual linksâ and you will realize it for yourself…also do not forget tagging, social networking, strategically bookmaking and beyond â the web changes so the web marketing too .. Cheers

I think reciprocal links never die. Because it done not only for search engine but also it is done for link popularity, spreading and became available usefull resources on a site.

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