The Dangers of Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking can be a valid way to improve your rankings in the search engines and improve the quality of content on your site for your visitors if the links that you exchange are useful for your visitors. The question you need to ask yourself before you exchange links is 'will this create value for my site's audience?' if the answer is no, then you should strongly reconsider your actions.

However with thousands of link exchanges being completed every minute there is an almost infinite array of tricks that webmasters can do to either avoid linking back to you or to discount the effect of their link back to you. Many search engines operate such that unless there is a piece of code with <a href=http:///www.yoursite.com>your website </a> no link will be counted towards your ranking.

The Top Thirteen Dirty tricks

1. JavaScript (or Dynamic) Links

The link back to you uses a combination of CSS and a JavaScript mouseover and onclick effect to appear as a regular link when in fact it is just a <span> tag which forwards people who click on the <span> to your website..

This means that when you move your mouse over the link the status bar reveals http://www.yoursite.com but when you look in the source code it reveals that the link really looks like this:

<SPAN CLASS="linklookalike"
onClick="window.location='http://www.yourwebsite.com' "
onMouseOver="window.status='http://www.yourwebsite.com/' "
onMouseOut="window.status='' ">your website </SPAN>

Most search engines still do not count JavaScript links and it will not help you rank in those engines where they can’t read them. Although Google and MSN search can read these links now, you won't get the benefit in other search engines that can't.

2. Redirected Links or "nofollow tags"

The link back to you looks like this:
http://www.theirsite.com/sites/91211.htm
or
http://www.theirsite.com/redirect.cgi?site=yoursite.com.

This is a link to a page that then redirects to your site. Again, many search engines cannot tell that this is a link, making your exchange fairly one sided.

Another very new technique which is being used widely on blogs to discourage spam comments is to include a nofollow tag, which will indicate to the search engines that the link should not be given nearly as much weighting as a regular link.

3. Link ‘n’ Spam

When spammers ply their tools on almost useless websites specifically engineered for advertising or affiliate revenue it can be very difficult to get links to their websites. Why? Because webmasters don’t want to link to spam sites or are worried about a penalty being applied to them for linking out to spam sites.

Naturally an effective strategy for the spammer is to build links to a seemingly legitimate domain that then applies more risky ranking techniques which results in it being banned. So you end up linking to a banned or penalized domain, potentially damaging your rankings.

4. Over Zealous Automated Scripts

Many webmasters have become creatures of worry. They worry that after you trade links, you will wait a few days and then simply take your link to their site down. Thus many of them have scripts which detect periodically whether you still have a link in place to them. Unfortunately many of these scripts are not foolproof and if your server is down whilst they are checking your page, their script will detect that the page is not there and will possibly remove your link.

5. Deleting the link.

This is by far the simplest and possibly most widespread method available to webmasters. You place your link to their site, they place theirs to yours, two weeks later they take your link off their page.

6. Non ‘Spiderable’ Web Page

Sometimes the reciprocal link will be placed on a page that is unable to be spidered. This way the link will count for naught. These are easy to pick up on as you can put the address of the page into the search engine and see if a cached version has been stored. It is also advisable to check the webmasters robots.txt to see if spiders are being blocked from the site or directory in which the page resides.

7. Cloaking

It is possible that when you filled out someone’s link request form, they recorded your IP address, and have been showing a particular links page to you based on your IP address. They may be showing a different version of this page to the search engines (one without your link). Again this can be countered by searching for that page and viewing the search engines cached copy. This is a seldom used technique.

8. Crowding out

This is a technique used in large scale link campaigns. The link partner simply keeps on adding links to the same page that your link is on. This dramatically reduces the positive effects of that link pointing towards your site. Your link is essentially crowded out or nullified by masses of other links (usually greater than 50 on a single page).

9. Dropping the www

Your site has URL http://www.yoursite.com. They link to yoursite.com. In the past some search engines consider this to be a different domain. Although this is less of an issue today.

10. Frames

Some domains still employ frames making it difficult to determine what the page rank is for an individual page and to tell if that particular page is cached by the search engines.

Just navigate to that page outside the frame (paste the address directly into your browser to determine this).

11. Using frames from other sites that already are linking to you

This is particularly sneaky as someone is already using a page (perhaps a free hosted site) to link to you and they are claiming credit for it.

12. Orphaned pages

An orphaned page is simply a page on a domain that has no links pointing towards it. Thus will never be found by the search engines. Again you can check this by searching for the page or a phrase from the page in a search engine.

13. Deliberate misspelling of your url

Sometimes a misspelling is no accident. If they don’t change your url immediately, then stop linking to them.