Reciprocal Links and SEO — Is it a Strategy or Hype

Posted by pings on December 25, 2008 under Seo |

I have done a lot of research on this subject. I have tried for years to just get one site I build visible to people searching in the Google index. When I studied Search Engine Optimization back at the start of the internet, the key was apparently Meta Tags. I started by slamming my pages with meta tags. Making sure my code was just a step better than the competition. I looked at sites ranking toward the top and I was astounded at what I found their keywords to be. Reputable businesses had meta keywords like Free XXX, Nudity, etc. Why? Because it that day these were big search terms, even though not related to their business, they wanted to pull any free traffic they good. One specific one selling contact lenses had stuffed their keywords with all kinds of crazy things. But they were ranking number 1. As you can imagine, I duplicated everything I could in their code I waited months, and I was never ranked anywhere.

So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn’t build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn’t even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.

I then went on to exchange links. I bought programs like SEO elite, which I do recommend for anybody to use, but not for this purpose. More on that program later. I also joined Linkmarket.net. I exchanged links like wild fire, making sure that my anchor text changed, following all the Guru’s advice. They claimed this is how they got their rankings. Bull, exchanging links is absolutely worthless. After doing this for a month, I went to see if the Guru’s were still offering link exchanges on their sites, if they had partner directories. Yeah right, there was no directories. They had already realized this was an ineffective strategy. Now links do help, search on Google for click here. Adobe ranks #1 and they don’t even have click here text on the page.

To answer the question no you should not EXCHANGE links. There are two ways to get links to your site that impact your rankings. First of all you share information like this. This article is going to get a bunch of links to my site, and help my rankings, and all I do is share my experience. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. So how do I get links that help my site.

Like I said two ways of getting links without exchanging. Link bait and content sharing. Link bait is like the ad that Burger King did on the internet with their chicken website. It was a guy dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and doing silly things. People linked to it in the masses and ranked Burger King number one for the word chicken. The problem with link bait is that you have to be extremely creative to make something people want to naturally link to. If you aren’t you can hire someone to do it for you for a pretty penny. It is possible to get these amounts of links easier.

Content sharing is exactly what you are looking at. I published this informational article for webmasters to add to their site. If people like it several website will publish it. A SEO site trying to provide free advice my put this article online. This helps them because if they constantly add content Google will spider frequently. This can help them if they make a change to their site, to have it updated in the index quickly. The catch is to use the content that I write they have to include my resource box. The resource box talks about me and then gives me a link to a site that I want. I submit a bunch of free content to the directories where webmasters go find it. When they find it an publish it I get a link back to my site. The best part is even if a webmaster doesn’t publish my article the directories they go for publish my article and that creates links. I don’t link out on my site at all. I do have meta tags, but they don’t really do much. I also only have a 3 page website and it still ranks nicely.

In conclusion, it is not a big site, nor meta tags, nor code for that matter. The best rankings I have received are from writing articles just like these and distributing. Plus it is so much fun to share information with the world through these articles. It is also manual, Google likes to punish folks inflating their results with quick fix scams like getting 1000 links in a day and such. These articles though, Google knows I took the time to write it, so it weights it very nice when it ranks my site. Like I said my basic job for promotion is to share free information, and then link it to my site.