Does reciprocal linking carry any value?
-
No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions.
Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website.
The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking?
Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out?
Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking?
Thanks
-
Hello Joshua,
What you are describing is nothing to be concerned about. It is a completely natural process when content is being created for there to be some form of reciprocal linking. This is especially true in list-pieces such as the one you are describing. There is no real need to avoid linking directly to them, and certainly nothing to worry about with regards to their social media accounts.
What Google is trying to get away from is people creating websites to link to each other using the same hosting or from the same webmaster. This is what leads to penalties. From their perspective, you are all (likely) on separate hosting, you all have different webmasters, and you are clearly recognized brands that are completely separate from one another. This is the kind of article they would want to see show up and is unlikely to create any unwelcome attention.
The links you receive will have plenty of value, assuming you are not being linked-to extravagantly over and over from the same domain. It's totally normal to see a couple of pages on a single domain link to another, but it gets to be spammy when you begin seeing 10's, 100's or even 1000's of links coming from a single source.
What you are describing is normal content creation - something Google has been adamant about for years. I don't think there's anything for you to worry about here.
Best of luck with the launch!
Rob
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal linking disaster
Can someone help me understand what my devs have done? The site has thousands of pages but if there's an internal homepage link on all of the pages (click on the logo) shouldn't that count for internal links? Could it be because they are nonfollow? http://goo.gl/0pK5kn I've attached my competitors opensiteexplorer rankings (I'm the 2nd column) .. so despite the face the site is new you can see where I'm getting my ass kicked. Thanks! psRsQtH.png
Technical SEO | | bradmoz0 -
Links in a Flash document
How do I tell if a link in a Flash document is follow or nofollow? Or doesn't it matter? (I just found out that my company placed an advertorial in a Flash publication and I want to make sure it doesn't wind up as a paid, followed link.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Linking domains on the same C Block together
Hey, I have an online store selling dj equipment, sound & light products such as speakers, lasers, decks, pa systems, karaoke systems etc. I just bought a new domain but I registered it under a different name and address (my personal details). And I plan on hosting the website on a seperate server so it has no connection with my eCommerce store. The main purpose of the website will be to review the products I sell, write detailed how to guides for DJ's, party planners, mobile DJ's etc. There will be links on the current ecommerce website (which currently gets around anything from 500 to 1000 unique hits a day) going to the new blog website. But would I be better off keeping it on the same C Block even though they are going to be two very different websites and the blog may not always necessarily be about the products on my ecommerce website and may be products on say eBay, Amazon, etc. (In otherwords, it's going to be it's own website with an unbiased opinion, but the ecommerce site will be linking to it on certain products that are reviewed on there). Any help is appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Deeper Anchor Link Finding Tool?
Hi! We are still working on removing some paid backlinks from an old SEO company. Used Removeem.com which uses OpenSiteExplorer. Thought we had them all cleaned up. Removed many and disavowed the rest. Submitted a reconsideration request, but our amigos at Google said, "No, no no...." So, the example offending remaining link they gave us was xyzs.blogspot.com. However, the anchor text link that Open Site Explorer was just xyzs.com. Interestingly enough, Google told us to look at their list of links and this sample links was not even there. (neither version.) So, we signed up for majesticseo as it integrates wtih removem via api if you have an account, but that didn't really add any links. Is there a deeper tool we can use? Any ideas on how to locate some of these hard to find anchor links that Google is talking about? Any other tools out there? Thanks!! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Link juice and max number of links clarification
I understand roughly that "Link Juice" is passed by dividing PR by the number of links on a page. I also understand the juice available is reduced by some portion on each iteration. 50 PR page 10 links on page 5 * .9 = 4.5 PR goes to each link. Correct? If so and knowing Google stops counting links somewhere around 100, how would it impact the flow to have over 100 links? IE 50 PR page 150 links on the page .33 *.9 = .29PR to each link BUT only for 100 of them. After that, the juice is just lost? Also, I assume Google, to the best of its ability, organizes the links in order of importance such that content links are counted before footer links etc.
Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
Too Many Internal Links?
Hi Guys, I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword. I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword. At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages. Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors. Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Are these links on timeout.com passing any value?
http://www.timeout.com/competition/ALHDubrovnik?DCMP=EMC-Travel-2011-07-14 The links pass through an internal system e.g. www.timeout.com/extern_link/?http://www.alh.hr Or what is the benefit to timeout of doing this? Cheers S
Technical SEO | | firstconversion0