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I don’t want to go into whether buying/selling links is good or bad but I can say that Textlinkbrokers are one of the top link brokers out there. However, the link brokers inventory in the gambling industry is poor so you will end up with low quality sites linking to you or in your case you linking to them.
Does Google know about their inventory? I would think that they have accounts on the biggest brokers out there.
/babyface
Is there any point to relevant but reciprocal links of the same PR or is it just a waste of outgoing link?
owldeath2 wrote:Is there any point to relevant but reciprocal links of the same PR or is it just a waste of outgoing link?Reciprocal links are worth very little.
If the case is SE penalties for the only fact of buying links, you may be penalized also for paid links in authority sites.
Right now entrepeneur.com is selling links.
What about a new PR0 linking from this website?Not in the casino field but I now about sites ranking very well with something like 200 links from a trade/links company.
If I decide to use one of these companies, adding links at the path of 5-10 per month I can’t see the risk.
howardmoon wrote:Reciprocal links are worth very little.I’m tierd of hearing that.. That’s simply far from being the truth. It is an unbased rumor. It is amazing how fast all these rumors about linking spread and turn into a guideline without being based. These are all speculations. Nothing more, Nothing Less.
This reciprocal links devaluating rumor started a long time ago when Google has began targting link farms that were actually sites with nothing but thousands of recprocated links.
As long as you don’t run a link farm with thousands of reciprocated links, reciprocal links are valuable and that’s based on my own experience.
Google knows the link exchange is a natural way of getting traffic from relevant sites.
Think about this scenario:
If You have a pet site, and you know about a good pet food company.. You even buy their dog food for your dog who loves it. You can place a link to them on your site and recommend their food to your visitors. After all, it is a pet site and your visitors have to feed their pets, right?So you contact the pet food company and ask them to recommend your site to their visitors and in exchange you will do the same.
Does this seem imaginable? Do you think the people at Google think this is not a realistic scenario and any such link must be treated as junk?
It’s easy to say reciprocal links are dead, I will not be amazed if people will start believe that google will ban their sites if they don’t fart 3 times a day. {please excuse my language}
I’ve used reciprocal linking. I still use it and it works great for me.. even on my own sites network i link all the sites and reciprocate and they all get great PR eventually and even rank well.
Reciprocals links are like any other links as long as you don’t have thousands of them and not all at once.
Google is using links from other sites to work out what sites are popular. It takes a link as a vote: “this site provides useful information on the subject of
; I vote for this site” A reciprocal link defeats that object. It’s not a vote of confidence. It’s a vote of “I’ll vote for you if you vote for me”. It tells Google that you don’t hugely care what is on the site you link to, you only care that they link back to you.
It’s common sense that reciprocal links should be no (or little) good, and it’s also common fact borne out of testing. Exactly how much they are valued or discounted is unknown, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near as good as one way links.
If you want to swap links, do 3 or 4 way linking to hide it somewhat. It’s just daft doing it directly.
@howardmoon]Google is using links from other sites to work out what sites are popular. It takes a link as a vote: “this site provides useful information on the subject of
I vote for this site”.[/QUOTE wrote: I agree
howardmoon wrote:A reciprocal link defeats that object. It’s not a vote of confidence. It’s a vote of “I’ll vote for you if you vote for me”. It tells Google that you don’t hugely care what is on the site you link to, you only care that they link back to you.I disagree,
if the sites have something in common, this is natural, normal and most legitimate as long as you don’t trade thousands of reciproclas.See my pets and pets food sample above.
If the sites are not related, that’s a different story which is not related to us because we speak on recip links between two gambling sites.
howardmoon wrote:It’s common sense that reciprocal links should be no (or little) good, and it’s also common fact borne out of testing. Exactly how much they are valued or discounted is unknown, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near as good as one way links.If you want to swap links, do 3 or 4 way linking to hide it somewhat. It’s just daft doing it directly.
No offence but
1. Did you do this testing by your self? If so, when and where? Can we have the detailes please?2. Do you have any official proof from Google about this?
3. Do you really think Google believes their guidelines should construct a new internet structure where reciprocal links should not exists?
Reciprocal links are fundamental, trading is fundamental. There’s nothing wrong in giving something in exchange to something.
As long as you don’t run a link farm, you are safe.
To put it another way:
Say you start reading a blog, on a subject that interests you. Half way through, the author starts talking about XYZ product, saying it really helped him out. The product sounds interesting, and it certainly sounds like it worked well for the author. But then you notice the link to the product is an affiliate link.
What do you think now? It may well be that the product was genuinely useful to the blog author, and it may well still be of interest to you, and you may still click it. But now you have a big warning sign in your head “maybe this guy just recommended the product because he gets paid if I buy it”
By contrast, if you had found the same link with no affiliate link, you would have no concern and you would believe that this author genuinely likes and recommends this product, with no ulterior motive. A non-affiliate link is therefore more valuable to your product-purchasing decision than an affiliate link; it is worth more “votes”.
You think all that because you are intelligent, and you have been around long enough to know that people often try and sell you things just to make money for themselves, and not because it will benefit you in any way. You know that there’s a chance the author just said it was great because he wants to make more money, not because it really is great.
Well guess what, Google is not dumb either, and they have been around a while too. It’s obvious to anyone that a reciprocal link has a strong likelyhood of an ulterior motive. Maybe the recommendation is still valid, but, just like the affid example above, it comes with a warning “this link exists not just for my benefit, but for their benefit too, treat it with a pinch of salt”. So its value is discounted – how much, who knows, but it’s not a trivial amount.
Having just read your reply, I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. In particular:
Quote:3. Do you really think Google believes their guidelines should construct a new internet structure where reciprocal links should not exists?I never said they shouldnt exist, and of course they will exist. There are numerous reasons why reciprocal links can and should exist in the real world, and I’m not saying they should be avoided too. I am talking purely about SEO. For SEO purposes, repcriocal links are worth very little. If you are obtaining links to boost your SE ranking, make sure they are oneway. If you are swapping links to boost direct click traffic, or just because it is a logical swap for your niche, go right ahead. You won’t be worse off than if you didn’t have those links, in SEO terms, you just won’t be much better off.
And it’s quite possible that google tracks 3 and 4 way links too, or will do in time. So that’s not a long-term business plan either. But generally it works ok for now.
To answer your other questions, yes I have done testing and no I won’t release the details. If you don’t believe me that’s quite all right and entirely up to you, I’m not trying to sell you anything here
Just telling you what I know to be true, but what you believe is up to you and I don’t care either way.Quote:Reciprocal links are fundamental, trading is fundamental. There’s nothing wrong in giving something in exchange to something.Nothing wrong, sure. Just don’t expect to gain much of a SEO boost if the majority of your links are reciprocal rather than one-way. Which, as I keep saying, is entirely fair enough – oneway links indicate that someone, of their own free will and for no obvious ulterior motive, ‘voted’ for your site. I’m surprised you’d argue that point, it seems pretty obvious to me that natural linking should be worth much more than a manufactured (i.e. traded) linking. And we know Google has the money, the time, the knowledge and the inclination to keep improving its algorithm, so why would they not use this common sense measure?
howardmoon wrote:To put it another way:Say you start reading a blog, on a subject that interests you. Half way through, the author starts talking about XYZ product, saying it really helped him out. The product sounds interesting, and it certainly sounds like it worked well for the author. But then you notice the link to the product is an affiliate link.
What do you think now? It may well be that the product was genuinely useful to the blog author, and it may well still be of interest to you, and you may still click it. But now you have a big warning sign in your head “maybe this guy just recommended the product because he gets paid if I buy it”
By contrast, if you had found the same link with no affiliate link, you would have no concern and you would believe that this author genuinely likes and recommends this product, with no ulterior motive. A non-affiliate link is therefore more valuable to your product-purchasing decision than an affiliate link; it is worth more “votes”.
You think all that because you are intelligent, and you have been around long enough to know that people often try and sell you things just to make money for themselves, and not because it will benefit you in any way. You know that there’s a chance the author just said it was great because he wants to make more money, not because it really is great.
Well guess what, Google is not dumb either, and they have been around a while too. It’s obvious to anyone that a reciprocal link has a strong likelyhood of an ulterior motive. Maybe the recommendation is still valid, but, just like the affid example above, it comes with a warning “this link exists not just for my benefit, but for their benefit too, treat it with a pinch of salt”. So its value is discounted – how much, who knows, but it’s not a trivial amount.
No hard feelings, but adding the aff links into the equation is irrelevant.
howardmoon wrote:To answer your other questions, yes I have done testing and no I won’t release the details. If you don’t believe me that’s quite all right and entirely up to you, I’m not trying to sell you anything here Just telling you what I know to be true, but what you believe is up to you and I don’t care either way.
Well, I’ve done testing on my network as well. I’ve been doing so since 2002 and my conclusions are apparently opposite to yours.
However, we are getting off topic into SEO strategies and SE Myths and facts. I have no intention to try and convince you in my believes and i’m sure this is true vice versa.
The question asked was:
Is there any point to relevant but reciprocal links of the same PR or is it just a waste of outgoing link?I can say yes a 100 times while you keep saying No, but we will be both just wasting our time and worst, we will not really answer this question.
So far, we have both gave our points of view. This should me more than enough for others to decide. getting deeper into this debate is worthless.
M.D wrote:No hard feelings, but adding the aff links into the equation is irrelevant.The point was to demonstrate the difference in trust levels. If someone tells you about product XYZ and it would appear that they are not affiliated with the company, they do not advertise that company, and in fact they have nothing to gain from recommending the product, you will say “this is a genuine recommendation, it is given for no reason other than to be helpful”. That is the equivalent on a one-way link.
If you see an affiliate link, it may still be useful to you, but you know that the link exists for a reason other than to be helpful. That is similar to a reciprocal link. It may be relevant, it may be useful to the reader, but it was put there only to make each site more popular in the search engines. Google know that, so of course they will treat these links with less importance.
That is a simpified example, but it was meant only to demonstrate a point – that different styles of linking convey different levels of trust.
Quote:Well, I’ve done testing on my network as well. I’ve been doing so since 2002 and my conclusions are apparently opposite to yours.Well in 2002 everything was exactly as you described. The change to the value of reciprocal links is much more recent.
How recent I can’t say, I’ve not been doing this for nearly as long as you. All my testing has taken place in the last 6 months.
BTW, all I say relates to Google; MSN and Yahoo are much less strict, much less sophisticated (so far), and therefore I would think recriprocal links probably still work there just as well as ever before. But Google is much stricter.
Anyway, you’re right to say that we’ll never convince each other, so you keep doing your thing and I’ll do mine and hopefully we will both be successful
Is there any point to relevant but reciprocal links of the same PR or is it just a waste of outgoing link?
What also plays a role here is:
How many reciprocal links are there? A small number with sites that rank well in the SERPS are most certainly useful IMO.
How old are they? If both sites have weathered the times, and the links have done so too, there is a good chance the links are honest recommendations.
Is the content of the sites complimentary? I think more so than slots linking to slots, a site that concentrates completely on slots can exchange links with a site that concentrates on BJ.
The bottom line is: Is the link actually useful and what you would really recommend to your visitors? The real reason for google’s scrutiny of links is the answer to this question. I have found that you never go wrong actually just doing what google would like to see in it’s serps, rather than outguessing the current algos.
Also, in that direction of thought, have you ever considered that google likes outgoing links to good sites that are not reciprocated at all? People always think about incoming links. If you look at major sites you will find many link out to sites they consider useful to their visitors without any type of reciprocation. Many blogs do extremely well for instance and do exactly that, just link to relevant items.
Google doesn’t reward people who outsmart the algos, that is always short lived success. IMO google rewards people who actually do what it wants them to do, and do it well.
Wow, a lot of good SEO talk here. I just got back from the SES conference in Chicago, so I’ll add in my additional comments…
What search engine algorithms are looking for are natural patterns of links to your site. If you go out and buy 1000 links to your site tonight, it doesn’t look natural to Google tomorrow. It won’t hurt your site, but it also won’t help. But, it’s not the amount of links, rather how you got those links that Google is looking at. Take for example a Katrina Relief website that gets posted right after the hurricane. A site like that probably got thousands of links overnight, but they were given from a wide variety of sites across all sorts of industries, domains, etc. That site will rocket to the top of the SERPs because the links occured naturally.
The trick for us as search marketers (oh, you thought you were a gambling affiliate?) is to create links to our site that occur in a natural sort of way, whether it is natural or not. That means a lot of hard work and time going out to find quality sites that will want to link to you for a variety of reasons. Maybe you wrote a good article, mayber your blackjack tips are so good that a site about a blackjack system wants to link with you, there could be a million reasons to potentially get links. Keep it on a natural course and everything will work out fine.
On the reciprocal linking issue. There is certainly value to reciprocal links, that is easy to prove. But, you still have to do it right. The best advice is this, are you linking to another site to benefit your users, or just trying to game the system? In the long run, links done for the right reasons will prevail.
One of the problems IMO is that often we forget the real game at Google.
A Link is a VOTE from one site to other site.
Google is talking about VOTES no links.Under this concept, for common sites is near to impossible to have the please of 100’s of sites in a short time , or to have links from high PR pages.
So using the concept of Vote is easy to have some order growing naturally etc.
webber – does the google algorithm have a ‘in case of hurricane goto top of serps’ line? How is this any different from buying thousands of links overnight? Only a human can tell the sort of things you are talking about.
owldeath, it is completely different. Ask yourself this question first…How would you go about buying 1,000 links today? From one of those companies that has 1,000 sites all designed nearly the same, maybe hosted on the same couple of servers, maybe they just all happen to be linking out to the same group of sites (whoever pays to be linked). Google absolutely can tell when something like this occurs (I know because it came out of their own mouths yesterday).
Now, to the Katrina example, everyone naturally setup links to organizations that were trying to help, probably millions of new links pointing to the Red Cross for example. Google will reward the Red Cross with Katrina related search results because of this, clearly understanding that they didn’t go out and pay everyone to link to them because every site is completely different in the eyes of the search engine.
The same would hold true for a brand new site that set themselves up to help Katrina victims and received a ton of links overnight. Google likes seeing a bunch of links to a site, they don’t like seeing clearly bogus links pointing to a site, and yes they can tell the difference.
As for buying links, it is perfectly acceptable to buy a few links here and there, Google even said they don’t have a problem with that. They have been pretty publicly stating not to buy links, but that gets mis-interpreted by some, what they seem to mean is stay away from link schemes, which has always been a part of their webmaster guidelines.
