Guest Post by Pamela of My Man’s Belly
As food bloggers, the one thing that we work on almost as much as our cooking is search engine optimization (SEO). One of the most commonly used tools in the search engine arsenal is the reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is a link that you put on your site that points to site B and site B puts a link on their site back to yours, site A. The link that site B puts up that points back to your site is called a backlink or inbound link.
Quality is the word of the day when it comes to reciprocal linking. Search engines look for your inbound links to come from quality sites (quality = sites that have relevant content to your own site). If an inbound link to your site isn’t relevant to the topic you write about (your site is all about vegan cooking and the inbound link is from a home decorating site), the search engine considers it less relevant and essentially ignores it. However, if you have a reciprocal link to this decorating site, the search engine views this link negatively and can downgrade or dilute the relevancy of your site.
Search engines also look for links to be developed over time. Much like our friendships take time to develop…search engines believe websites should have that same dynamic. If you spend a hardcore weekend sending out those pleasant quid pro quo e-mails looking for reciprocal link trades, the search engines are going to frown on your site. While no person makes 50 friends overnight (Twitter and Facebook don’t count in this discussion), search engines don’t believe that websites make 50 friends that quickly either. If you’re going to carry out this e-mail campaign strategy, do it slowly over time.
When undertaking your backlink strategy (yes, you should have a strategy for your backlinks) there are some tools to help you keep on track. You need to keep track of who is linking back to you (especially if you were using the quid pro quo methodology for building links). A reciprocal link checker can help you determine if everyone is playing fairly with you. This tool does require you to know the url of each of the sites that is supposed to be linking to you. Another tool to check your backlinks is a link popularity tool. This tool will show you how many inbound links you have on a specific url of your site and it shows the link counts for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It won’t tell you where the links are coming from, just the overall number. The overall number of inbound links a site has, the higher it typically ranks in the search engines.
When undertaking link building as part of the Search Engine Optimization of your web site, make sure that you have a strategy for creating your links. As with most things in life, it’s quality over quantity when it comes to website linking.
