LinksManager.com Blog

This is not, to quote Charles Dickens, a tale of two cities.  It is instead a tale of two hours, two methodologies, two means to the same end.

To save you the suspense, we’ll give you the tale’s ending right here at the beginning … one of the methods is smart and productive, the other is dumb and counterproductive.

The truth is that linking, done ethically and effectively, requires some investment of time.  You can’t just snap your fingers, say “abracadabra” and watch high-quality, relevant links instantly appear on or to your website.

Even if you subscribe to LinksManager, you can’t just log into your Control Panel or click on your Link Exchange Browser Toolbar, select a radio button and automatically add links to your pages.  You still have to do some of the legwork yourself.  Your contribution to the effort, maintaining editorial control over your links, is, in fact, exactly what makes LinksManager so effective at adding real value to your site ,and ensures that LinksManager is fully compliant with all major search engine webmaster quality and content guidelines … including Google’s.

So now, let’s set the stage for our two-hour tale.  You’re sitting in front of your computer.  You operate a site selling beach accessories — sand mats, tanning supplies, canopies, body boards — the whole nine yards.  Everything but swim suits.  Since swim suits and beach supplies go together like sun and burn, you realize that a reciprocal link between you and some swimwear vendors could drive new customers to your site and, possibly, improve your search-engine rankings due to the high mutual relevancy of the sites.

You are also committed to an ethical, intelligent, search-engine-friendly linking strategy that involves finding, soliciting and gradually adding quality relevant links to your site.   And you need to take care of occasional housekeeping chores relating to your existing links.  You have, essentially, two ways to do all this: Manually or via LinksManager.

Using that scenario, let’s see what you might hope to accomplish in an hour of “manual” labor.

Minute 0-4: Go through incoming email finding and picking out any link solicitation requests.

Minute 4-9: Visit and evaluate prospective link partners’ sites.

Minute 9-13: Respond to solicitations you accept.

Minute 13-45: Go to your site, visit all your link partners’ sites and search to make sure your link is still active on one of their pages.

Minute 45-47: Wait for your web building software to boot up.

Minute 47-53: Navigate to your links page, delete dead links and reformate page.

Minute 53-59: Format two or three new links to fit your page design, place them on the page and correct the spacing between items.

Minute 59-60: Search for and examine swim suit vendor sites and send email link exchange requests to the webmasters of those which meet your standards.

Question: What was the most important task you hoped to complete during this hour?  Answer:  Find some potential link partners who e-tail bathing suits.  And how much time did you have to do that in? One minute.  Routine grunt work occupied the other 59.

Now let’s run the same scenario using LinksManager.

Minute 0-1: Login to your LinksManager Control Panel

Minute 1-6: Examine your Pending Link list, click the sites you’d like to visit and respond to each link request by clicking on “approve” or “delete.”

Minute 6-9: Go to the Control Panel’s Reciprocal Link Checker and scan the link list, which is continuously updated by LinkManager’s proprietary and patended link checking spider.  If any sites are identified as not containing a link to your site or as being offline, you have instant point-and-click options to automatically email a query to the webmaster, temporarily remove the link from your site, or permanently delete the link.  If you decide to delete the link, your links page will be automatically adjusted and reformatted to accommodate the change.

Minute 9-12: Quickly and effortlessly integrate two or three new links into your links page with just a few mouse clicks.

Minute 12-60: Search for and examine swim suit e-commerce sites and send a Link Exchange Request Email to the webmasters of those which meet your standards.

Wow, LinksManager has just cut 47 minutes off your typical linking “work hour.”

Forty-eight minutes you can spend using LinksManager’s advanced tools for finding new link partners.

Forty-eight minutes you can use to attract higher-quality link partners by crafting better Link Exchange Request Emails.

Or 48 minutes you can allow to accumulate until you’ve saved enough time to take a day off and go to the beach.

After all, you shouldn’t expect your customers to buy products you haven’t field tested yourself.

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“He said, she said.”  A form of argument which would almost certainly be older than anything, even dirt or the oldest profession, if it weren’t for the fact that getting dirty and practicing the oldest profession were both possible prior to the development of the spoken language.

“He said/she said.”  It’s as current as this morning’s cross-examination in Anywhere and Everywhere USA’s thousands of divorce courts.

It’s as ancient as the Bible, stretching back in an unbroken line to the days when Solomon was being bored to tears by endless streams of shepherds and rug merchants claiming they’d been short-changed.

“He said I could choose any ewe from his flock in barter for a calfskin of my red, oh, King.”

“Nay, honored Lord, he saith false.  I offered only a ewe of my choosing, the smallest and leanest in the flock.”

It’s as common as two political candidates locked in a battle of absurdities.

She: His healthcare plan throws millions of people to the wolves, mine covers every species including inchworms.

He: My healthcare plan is all inclusive, hers leaves out Civil War veterans.

What, if anything, does any of this have to do with search engine optimization, Google and reciprocal linking?

Read on.

For years, since just about the time search engine optimization became a growth industry and self-proclaimed SEO gurus began earning more money than individuals handing out shopping carts while intoning “Welcome to Target,” discussions about reciprocal linking have been dominated by unending streams of “he say/she say” hearsay.

SEO “expert” one says: Google downgrades websites with reciprocal links.

SEO “expert” two says: Google increases the PageRank of sites with quality reciprocal links.

Link farm operator says: Instantly adding thousands of automatically harvested random links is good for your return position.

We here at LinksManager say:  Black-hat practices like automatically adding a high volume of random irrelevant links is likely to get you down rated or completely dropped from the Google index.

Web columnist A says: Google only counts back links from major websites, reciprocal linking is dead as a doodoo.

Web columnist B says: Getting back links from major sites is almost impossible for most e-commerce websites.  Reciprocal links drive traffic to your site and are counted by Google.

And the beat goes on … and on … and on.  Every he, she and it has something to say on the subject and everyone of them — except for a few Google insiders — is either just guessing or deliberately spreading self-serving propaganda for one very simple reason, nobody knows how Google’s ranking algorithm works except Google.

Does this mean you need the wisdom of Solomon to separate reciprocal linking truth from fiction? Fortunately, not. All you need to do is to keep your ear to the ground and listen closely for emanations originating from behind the Google Curtain.

In other words, if someone Google has licensed to speak says something, pay attention ’cause its undoubtedly true.

Webspam team leader Matt Cutts is inarguably Google’s 007.  He’s not only licensed to speak, he’s virtually mandated to.  Whenever Google deems it prudent to provide a talking head for a forum, conference or workshop, it’s almost always the Cutts cranium that arrives on the silver platter.  And his blog has long been required reading for every truth seeker on the Search Engine Superhighway.

So when Matt discussed reciprocal linking with interviewer Eric Enge a few weeks ago (June, 2008) we followed our own advice and paid close attention.  Here are a few Cutts quotes in no particular order:

1. If you look at the Google directory … it’s almost certain that Google links to Yahoo and Yahoo links to Google on some level, which means there is a reciprocal link in some sense between Google and Yahoo.  What that demonstrates is that reciprocal links do occur naturally, and it’s not a thing to be surprised about.

2. Not so long ago (we) improved our documentation, because at first we said avoid the reciprocal links.  Really, what you need to do is avoid the excessive reciprocal links.  So we added the word excessive.

What we mean when we say avoid excessive reciprocal links is if your portfolio has a very large fraction of links where you’re getting them by sending automated emails saying “did you know that exchanging links can help your rankings in search engines?”

So, we tell people to avoid excessive swapping and the nice thing is that people have a pretty good idea of what excessive is … people are going to understand that it’s natural that reciprocal links happen in the course of being on the web.

3. We do still encourage people to have interesting and helpful links for their users.

4. If it (adding a reciprocal link) is good for your users, then go ahead and do it.

5. Maybe it was Danny (Sullivan) that said “If a link is good, do the link out; don’t worry about the Linkjuice.”

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or a CIA-level code breaker to understand what Matt is saying.  Nor does his message need to be professionally translated by any “expert” or “guru.”

In clear, simple English he’s saying (1) that Google appreciates that reciprocal links are a natural part of the web; (2) that mindless, automatic addition of mass links is a no-no; (3) that Google smiles on “interesting and helpful links;” and (4,5) that links, like every other element on a website, should be accepted or rejected based on whether they provide value to the end user without concern for search engine implications.

Or as the official Google Quality Guidelines put it, “make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”

For the full text of Eric Enge’s interview with Matt Cutts, click here.

We here at LinksManager have been preaching to our users for the past decade to link for the end user, and not for search engines.  Matt Cutt’s interview with Eric Enge is proof that reciprocal linking is alive and well and accepted by search engines on today’s internet.  Our mantra is unchanged:  Link with quality sites for the end user and mantain a natural link acquisition rate.  LinksManager was designed from the ground up to facilitate editor based natural volume linking for the end user.

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