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Reciprocal Links and SEO -- Is it a Strategy or Hype

By Brent Sweet

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.

Then on the advice of some Gurus I decided to start a link exchange. I put code on my site on how to exchange links, and on top of that I joined Linkmarket.net to exchange links. I was able to secure a bunch of links to my site and I built a reciprocal directory with probably 400 partner sites. Guru's claimed this is how they go their rankings, but after some testing I decided to see if these Guru's have reciprocal links on their site. Guess what? They didn't. These guys weren't using reciprocal links to get those rankings. Once again I saw no results, and had proof that the Guru's pushing this also saw it as ineffective. I don't want this to be construed that links don't help. Look at the results for "click here" on Google. Adobe ranks #1 and click here is not anywhere on their site as a keyword. They just have a bunch of links with that anchor text. However, they are not exchanged links. I haven't found one site being number one on Google with exchanged links.

The answer to the question is no you should not exchange any links. The two ways to get your site links that impact your rankings is to share information like I do and link bait. The article that you are reading is also helping my rankings. I just write about my experience and knowledge, then distribute it to webmasters who want to constant update their content to get indexed several times a day. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. That is how I get links to my site, without exchanging them. I exchange information for one way links.

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.

I prefer to use content sharing like this article you are reading. I publish informative articles and distribute them to directories that webmasters go to get content for their site. If people like my information they will publish my article. For instance this article will probably get published by SEO website trying to provide current advice on improving rankings. This benefits the webmaster because if they are constantly adding new content spiders will hit their site more, therefore each change will be indexed faster. That catch is that to use my content they must provide a link back to me in my resource box. This box cannot be modified. If no webmaster likes my article, it is still published in 1000s of directories that I submit to, creating great links back to my website. I do not have an outbound link on my site. I have meta tags that are almost worthless, but my 3 page site ranks very well for keywords due to content sharing.

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.

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