When was the last time you cleaned up your reciprocal links?
Written by The Shops at 24Seven on Wednesday, April 08, 2009I'm not going to get into if reciprocal linking still works and if there is any value in it. My opinion is that it can, if your very selective and work only with reputable websites whose link pages are actually indexed by Google.
Most of us already have a links page tucked down in our bottom navigation from when we first launched the site years ago. Back then we knew reciprocal linking worked. So, you just keep it down there and ignore it out of fear of losing the external links from those partners.
My Strategy
This week I was spending time looking over the sites we link to from these pages and cleaning them up. I'm noticing many of the sites no longer exist, so I kill those. Then a good amount you can tell have not been touched in years, more link brutality. I Google the links pages where are links show up to see if they are indexed. If not, kill them. What's the point of linking to them if Google never has found the link back to you?
Lastly, I killed some simply because I'm not comfortable with linking out to them. Call me paranoid but if Google views links as a recommendation, we need to be careful who we are recommending. I don't want to get labeled as a bad neighborhood. In high school, if you hung out with the wrong crowd, it was because you WERE the wrong crowd. That's my reciprocal link logic. So, spend some time in the next few weeks reviewing who you are recommending.
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