How Reciprocal Linking Does Work

Reading SEOBlackHat the other day, I saw a link to this forum discussion about Pole Position Marketing's (PPM) post that "Reciprocal Links Are (Still) Not Dead" (you can also find the post on PPM's blog under: Your Mamma Don't Dance and Reciprocal Links Are Not Dead). PPM created several web pages on their site, mainly non-sense filler pages like this one, that link out to non-reciprocating pages or that link to pages that reciprocate a link back to PPM's site. One example of a reciprocating link is this page on PPM and the link at the bottom of the Up North Sports home page which links back to the main PPM home page with the text "WebSite Promotion Services":

The big discovery in PPM's article, in my own boiled down way, is that linking from lame door way pages with non-competative keyword phrases like "Reciprocallinksarenotdead" can cause both reciprocal and non-reciprocal pages to appear for non-competative keyword phrases in the search results. In PPM's own words:
"We can conclude from that that, all things being equal, reciprocating links have no more or less value than one-way links. Yeah, I know, we all read Matt Cutt's post about how excessive reciprocal linking can hurt, and I'm sure Matt is right. But the key word there is "excessive"." Here is the blog post that PPM is referencing.

What are excessive reciprocallinks?

So what are "excessive" reciprocal links? There are lots of combinations where excessiveness can pop up. I'm going to give you a really obvious example of "excessive". Keep in mind that this is just one example.

Say you had a site that was all about pies, baking pies, eating pies, pies in the movies, pie reviews, etc. It would makes sense to have a variety of links pointing to your site. Pies have a potetnial appeal to just about every one (I like ice cream more). What if they have a "resources" section on their site and rather than lots of links pointing to pie related sites, they link to a variety of sites with just about every topic under the sun?

Lets also say that they have several pages like the reciprocallinksarenotdead page above. These pages may or may not be part of the normal flow of the site's navigation. The pages may be secretively hidden in a site map (hidden away from most visitors), or have a no-follow or other method to try to keep engines from them, or not. They often use page names like link.htm, links2.htm, ylinks.htm, glinks.html, glinks.htm, gpages55.htm, yhooresources.asp, and similar file or folder extensions. The file name or extension alone probably doesn't trip an alarm in the engines every time, but with other features like excessive links on a page, this certainly could cause a page to stick out like a red flag. Pages like the mock up above risk a site or page's ability to help itself to improved rankings or pass on any "popularity" to the sites that it links to. In Google terms, this creates a "bad neighborhood" and can be seen as an attempt to trick an engine into providing more page rank to you.

An Example of non excessive linking, please?

So what is not excessive? In my cheesy graphic above, I used the this Web 2.0 logo creator. Now, I didn't exchange links with the creator of the logo, but lets pretend for a second, that I did. Lets also pretend that the link just before this sentence was a link back from a link exchange. And lets additionally pretend that there was a blog on h-master.net where the Web 2.0 logo creator had a post back to MarketPosition and the blog had a past that said something like:
"10/17/07
Hey, look at this, I'm being features on sites like Valleywag, Fireworks Guru Forum, and MarketPosition. You must really like some of my flash based Web 2.0 parody pages. Thanks! If there is enough feedback, I'll create more things like this."

Certainly not excessive. A normal link and normal content for what you would find in most blogs, both on our site and in the imaginary blog that he might have, if he had a blog. If this situation were real, you wouldn't be able to tell if this was a link exchange, or me just commenting about his tool, linking to it, and him commenting back. By the way, this is also how paid links fly under the radar.

Summary of reciprocallinksarenotdead

So, link exchange dead? It was never dead. There were just some that used it in a non-excessive way and flew under the radar. There were others that don't understand what it means to be subtle and who incidentally flag themselves to the engines, and don't really help themselves in their original goal of obtaining improved rankigns for competative keywords. If you have an obscure term like Reciprocallinksarenotdead, it is entirely possible to rank on it by exchanging links with another web sites that has pages of non-sense filler content and a few simple links. It is also possible for a web page that doesn't even use the term "reciprocallinksarenotdead", to rank based on a few links from nonsense pages, this is a mini-Google bomb if you will. But for more competative terms? Probably not, then you are looking at much more filtering by engines like Google. Are your links used subtly, the way a car or other product is placed on a TV show or movie with out drawing a ton of attention to it? Or is your linking unsubtle like looking at a Nascar that is plastered with advertisements from grill to tailpipe? Depending on how your linking is set up and how competitive your target keyword is, this will likely make all the difference in the world as to your opinion on whether "link exchanges" are dead or whether obvious attempts to game the search engines through links, is
nearing the end of usefulness.

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By the way, as of 10/26/07, 2 days after this post was made, this post - the one you are reading, now ranks for "reciprocallinksarenotdead". Google and Yahoo have indexed this page and other pages off of MarketPosition.com, but they do not report that any one else is linking to this article yet. So, not a tough keyword to rank on.

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