It’s a question that surfaces regularly in online forums dedicated to link building and search engine optimization techniques : Is reciprocal linking dead?
Yes, yes, reciprocal linking is over, insist those who are pushing the scam-du-jour; paid links, cloaked sites, some new metatagging application that promises to conjure up the magic words that will catapult you to the top of all search engine results in mere seconds after your site goes live.
But here’s the real deal: reciprocal linking is not and will never be dead, according to the people who best understand the web.
Do you think we’re saying that just to promote LinksManager? Nope. LinksManger is based on an essential truth about the web, a fact that will never change. The web is built on links. That’s why it’s called the web – it’s a huge, interconnected, interlinked wonderful conglomeration of people, places and things. That’s the way it was intended to be. There was an Internet long before there was a web and the Internet wasn’t easy to use and navigate through mostly because information wasn’t linked to other information. Every university, science lab and government domain was an island unto itself.
Site operators naturally tend towards reciprocal linking. Bob has a motorcycle shop, and he links to Joe’s custom paint service’s site. Joe puts a link to Bob’s shop on his site because his customers are always asking for recommendations on where to buy custom parts. Joe and Bob aren’t involved in some evil scheme to artificially boost their search engine rankings; they are providing a valid and useful reference service for their customers. This is exactly what a web site is supposed to do.
What doesn’t work, and what search engines may penalize you for, are high volume irrelevant reciprocal links, publishing a long list of sites that have no connection to your business, or linking to sites that have no reason to link to each other.
Yahoo tells people who want to enhance their ranking on Yahoo’s search engine “Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages… ‘Link farms’ create links (many times in high volume very quickly) between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts”. And Google urges web site owners to “have other relevant sites link to yours”.
That’s why LinksManager is EDITOR BASED .. giving you the editorial power to decide which types of websites that you do, and do not wish to exchange links with. Hey, we use the web – we live on the web. We don’t want to break it with cheesy link exchange scams; we just want to make it easier to do what you’d be doing anyway; linking out to and receiving links from sites that benefit your customer base.
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