Link Baiting For Seo ? Should I Reciprocally Link Or Not?
So, you are thinking about that email request. The one you got last week about giving someone a reciprocal link. You don't know this person from adam, but there you are trying to make the best decision for your own website.
Most of us search engine optimization afficionados keenly know what this phrase means, but for the rest it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.
Post Altavista if you can remember that far back, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and initially search engines had no problem with this but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because too many of the reciprocal links were contrived and not natural.
Spam is known to many of us as that tasty meat from which the current swine flu propagates,lol, sorry couldn't help myself, but in internet lingo it is also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.
So for example, too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. At that time, the search engines were not looking at these items such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same group or which 20 reciprocal links were sharing the same IP Address. In order to thwart the spammer type group, this info is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.
It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses - traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have failed.
Why? We can't specifically tell others to use such and such an anchor text in their link to us. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?
Also, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, you are going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A brand new site, even after being indexed by Yahoo or most search engines, doesn't stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords - sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.
And perhaps that's not all one has to worry about.
But there is yet one more major problem. The page rank of new articles is N/A or after indexing, typically Zero where 0 is worst and 10 is the best. Although some may argue this while a new page with N/A or O as its rank will have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, its zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will definitely work against it.
Exceptions to this - if the newly created page is sitting on a very popular web2.0 social network property like kijji or facebook, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won't be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.
We suspect these exceptions work because, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are actually hosted on.
Technical babble galore - the question really is - What can a novice do ?
Many seo experts might say, go back to fundamentals, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that you even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you.Which I also recommend if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. Ignoring Google's advice is always done at your own peril, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to socially bookmark that page on your site - If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.
There has got to be a better way no?
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