I have been asked several times lately to do a reciprocal link, which basically works like this: Hey Wade — I’ll link to your site if you’ll link to mine. Mind you that these requests are from total strangers, although they are people in the real estate business. Such a request seems innocuous, but in reality, it can be very dangerous to exchange links.
In determining search rankings, Google looks at who you link to and forms an opinion of your site based on those outgoing links. If Google sees that you are linking out to a good crowd (think Lenderama, realtor.com or StateFarm.com, for example), they form an opinion about your site based on the “friends” you are choosing to link to. If, however, you are linking to porn and gambling sites, for example, Google will probably label you as a troublemaker. You don’t want to link to a “bad neighborhood,” as the techies have termed it. There is a bad neighborhood tool that you can use to determine if a site is questionable. However, if you run your buddy’s site through the bad neighborhood tool, and he checks out, that doesn’t mean that the reputation of his site will stay good. In the end, there is no way to determine if a site’s reputation is good or bad except to use good common sense.
There are what are known as link schemes. In the old days you could exchange links with other sites, and it would help your Google rankings. Then Google began to discount those reciprocal links. They prefer to give credit to sites that have one-way, incoming links. The schemers contrived these multi-way linking schemes in an effort to confuse Google. They work like this. You link to site “A,” and site “A” links to site “B,” and site “B” links to site “C” … and so on and so forth until finally someone links back to your site. The trouble with this is that Google has a plethora of smart guys on staff. They get these link scheme emails, and they immediately go to work combating these schemes. If you link to a friend’s site and that person decides to get involved in a link scheme, for example, you could find yourself indirectly linking out to a bad neighborhood filled with porn, gambling and Viagra.
If you decide to exchange links with someone, realize that you are indirectly linking to everyone that site is linked to. It was once big news that when you have sex, you are actually having sex with all the people that person has had intercourse with. That’s old news now, but it works the same with linking. If someone asks you to exchange links, remember that there are risks involved, and do so only if you really trust the web site. You don’t want to wind up on Google’s blacklist.
Wade Young is a Colorado Mortgage Broker.
Good post, Wade. I never do reciprocal links, ever. All of my blogs are personal, even when business oriented. I choose and change my links at will.
Wade, thanks for the post, it is critical that you know who you are linking to. and thanks for the link that you supplied so that we can see if we are linked to bad apples. I know that I am alwasy trying to make sure that we are linked to the right people that is going to give us the page rank that we need, and this is really going help. I am so glad that lenderama is around.
Cool. I like the sex analogy:) I ran the tool on one of my sites and the one “questionable” link happened to go to the CA Dept of Real Estate! Makes you wonder what they’re doing over there…..
Thanks for the tool great tool!
Reciprocal linking is a fairly old practice that some still use, it’s still amazing how many of these requests arrive in my inbox daily.
I was recently lightly harassed by a mortgage site webmaster who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I finally blocked his e-mails. No is NO and no version of the same kinda question is gonna get a different response. Yoi!
So, we need to go around poking into the six degrees of seperation of the site you want to link to and any possible bad apples that he might be linking to? That’s unfair. I mean, you like a page, or a site, you provide a link to it, so your readers can enjoy it too. As simple as that. Why think about what the search engines want?
Yeah you are right and I totally agree with you. You should always monitor your reciprocal links.
I too get a couple of linking requests daily but err and the side of caution and choose to ignore them. It is such a minefield. I am also totally sick of spam comments on my blog, the ones that a) add nothing to the conversation and b) have pharmaceutical links injected between nonsense text. Surely the originators don’t honestly think I am going to approve them!
Great tool…I scanned my blog and only got one potentially bad link “naked capitalism”…too funny.
Wade,
I am very new to the real estate blogging world. I helped start one for my team about 6 months back. I just started working on link building and this is a great tool to ensure that the people I choose to link to are credible. Thank you very much for the wise insight.
-Brendan