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Link Exchange Programs

There are many discussions regarding search engine algorithms. One topic that keeps coming up over and over is regarding link exchange programs. We are all getting a feel for the importance of solid in-bound links into our sites. What may be unclear is that not all links are created equal.

Perceived web popularity is extremely important when search engines consider a site for a high rank. They want to know the site is an authority and has relevant information and one way to determine that is if other sites cite or quote (giving credit by linking) a given site. This means the link to the site is found within the content or at the foot of the content.

Search engines have wised up to the link sharing and do not value it as highly (some claim that no value is given for a simple link exchange) as content linking or citing. In other words if my site shows up in a list of other sites they all share the page rank and very little value is passed along to the site(s) being linked to. On the other hand, if a link is surrounded with great content and the page is valuable, the page receiving the inbound traffic will receive a higher value.

How should this affect agents? Spend as much time as possible trying to find sites who will cite your page or site. Be leary of link exchange requests, especially from a page that has a low page rank. It won't help much if at all, and is valuable time wasted. Write content and provide tools that other sites link to because of its valuable nature. If a tool is valuable people will link to it. If your city information is valuable people will link to it. Become the authority for great information in your area. Post on sites (ah, the blessed A|R) who already have a great page rank and will allow outbound links to your site. Spend time where your site will receive the most value.

Posted by Agent Web Design on 03/13/2007 08:00 PM

Comments (16)

agent web design seo

16 Comments on Link Exchange Programs

MAR

2007

I would love some ideas on how to find those site that will cite my page. Just before Christmas, while I could still take the tax deduction, I paid for some quality one way links. It is definitly paying off now but I would love to find some sites where I didn't have to pay.

Great info here but I have a question about outbound links to my site. How does posting on AR create outbound links to my site? I've noticed people have links in their posts to other sites, articles, or information but none of the posts link back to THEIR website. For example, Google found one of my posts but did not connect it with my site. Does posting on AR really help in that respect? I've been curious about this for a while and would love some feedback. Thanks for your post.

MAR

2007

Patricia,

yes, links to your site in posts do count, and will be crawled and counted, but links in comments don't.

I personally think that reciprocal linking is dead

Hi Justin,

Sorry, but I am going to disagree. You wrote, "Search engines have wised up to the link sharing and do not value it as highly (some claim that no value is given for a simple link exchange) as content linking or citing."

Dirk Johnson of Domain Drivers (www.domaindrivers.com) in writing to another person making that same claim said, "This concept that reciprocal links has been devalued is simply a theory that is promoted hard by people selling one-way link services. It's been around for years. Nobody anywhere has ever provided any evidence that substantiates it. It's all just conjecture, and a very weak one, at that.

To the contrary, as someone who has worked hundreds of reciprocation campaigns in one form or another since 1997, we have irrefutable evidence that it has worked, and still works. In the form of our own clients, as well as the sites we link them with. The number of examples that refute the "reciprocation doesn't work" claims are endless. Reciprocation works for old domains and new domains. We see this daily, again and again. That is just a fact, not a sales pitch.

In fact, in real estate related search, you will find that most of the agent/broker sites that rank well for their search terms in the most competitvie markets have acheived that primarily via reciprocation. All you have to do is look at the search results, especially in Google. Then look at those well ranking agent/broker sites to see that they have link directories and they reciprocate willingly. It's pervasive.

Let's not go down the road that "good content" will generate large numbers of one-way links. By and large, the world is not standing at the ready to link to the content of an agent broker site, based on some sort of remarkable content. Anyone who promises that is misleading their readers. It rarely happens that way.

Sure, there are exceptions. Usually, those exceptions represent sites that have devoted nearly full time to the task. And they promoted it hard. The average agent/broker does not have the time for that, not the budget to hire someone skilled enough to do it. The "good content generates links" sites that are held up as examples are certainly out there, and I don't deny that they exist, but they are not duplicatable for the average agent.

But it does not matter what I say, or what you say about this. It all plays out, independent of both us. Site owners make their choices. Some will reciprocate. Others will listen to the experts in the SEO world who tell them it doesn't work. Twelve months later, we all get to observe the outcome."

Dirk's firm works for many of my web clients and, based upon their rankings in the search engines, and I must agree with this link expert.

Marchel: Here are some simple things you can do: add a profile to linkedin.com, facebook.com, tribe.net, ebay.com (don't become a groupy, just set up a profile and link out), etc. Find forums you can post to that are relevant to your service area. I posted in the forum for "Las Vegas" the TV show and linked to my "About Las Vegas" page. I have gotten several hits and I'm sure the search engines love the credibility that NBC, or whoever it is, has. They give my site some of that love because the forum is citing it.

Patricia: Here's an article to consider: http://activerain.com/blogsview/57211/Blogging-Make-the-Best.

To add a link in your post or in a comment high-light the text you want to be the link and click the little "chain link looking thing" in the gray bar just above the text area. It will ask for the URL to paste in there.

Justin: Yep, reciprocal linking has been devalued. Whether or not it is dead, only the engine owners can tell based on their algorithms but SEO experts commonly agree that your time can be better spent in other SEO activities.

Win: Hmmm? I don't know that reciprocal link exchange programs are worthless but I wouldn't say they provide the value they have in the past. I have many reciprocal links to multiple of my sites that I have created over the years from pages with great page rank. Google only gives credit for a couple of them and I'm sure Google knows they are there because the page the link is on has a page rank and the link has been there for along time. Articles by the dozens can be found suggesting that reciprocal programs are not as valuable as they used to be. Large real estate agent design companies are leaning away from these programs they once used to tout.

The reason link exchange is less than desirable to search engines is because most pages with these links are just pages that look like link directories. Search engines see link directories as spam and hate them unless there is considerable relevant content to accompany the links.

Here is an example. One of my newer sites was only in the top 700 for Google for the targeted keywords. It is located on directories, reciprocal links, etc. and it really doesn't have that much content so it may not even deserve a high rank yet. I linked to it from A|R which is has a ton of very relevant content and within a week my site was in the top 10 for the targeted search term and hasn't moved in the 3 months since then. Search engines want to see a link from a credible site, not just some list of other links. They would do away with all of the link spammers if they could.

I'm not saying to reject a link exchange request. Most inbound links can help (some may actually hurt a site). What I am saying is that there are much better uses of an agent's time that can provide better value.

MAR

2007

Folks,

It is a complete fallacy that reciprocation has been discounted. Where is there a single shred of proof? I have been asking this for years from every single person that makes the claim. To date, not a single shred of proof has emerged. Nothing. Zilch.

The retorts that come back to my request for proof are invariably nothing more than insults toward me. Nobody ever provides anything that substantiates it with real SERP research. Maybe because nothing exists that supports the claim?

It's all based on "he said it, so I said it". A million people claiming something does not make it true.

To the contrary, we still see *brand new domains" that use reciprocation as their only means of building links climbing the rankings, even in *very* competitive markets. It is pervasive.

So, people can choose to do what they want, but when they take reciprocation off the table due to a belief in some SEO theory that has no verifiable foundation to it, and plenty of contradictory evidence, then they are only hurting themselves. Because their competitors are simply continuing to reciprocate, very effectively.

Reciprocal linking does indeed work very effectively. However, there are a few "rules of thumb" that should be adhered to when asking a web site owner to add a link to your web site.

Search engine algorithms vary from company to company. The engineers working for ?oogle have a different set of metrics that "they" feel are "valuable" when compared to those working for Microsoft, for example. In my opinion, I feel the MSN Search Engine is very friendly, and have encouraged my organization to include links to the MSN Search Engine on all our customer Internet web sites. As a result, our client-hosting web server has fallen in good favor with MSN search results.

What to avoid when asking for reciprocal links? The most important thing to avoid is being placed on a long laundry list of links that appear just for attracting search engine attention. This may have worked five years ago, but no longer. If a web site owner will place your link on a few "relevant" pages, then this is good and will be recognized as a valid incoming link. Think of it as a "natural link". Natural links to your website are very significant. To build a list of natural links takes work. You, the web site owner, must seek out and identify web sites where you would like to get a link. And you have to decide, or guess, at whether your email/phone request will even be answered.

One strategy that a client recently adopted was to provide FREE links (with graphics) to a variety of businesses. They did this in order to gain attention to their site via search engine algorithms and text-based internet searches. They have a talented graphic design team and will happily design custom advertisements for businesses that would like to advertise on their site for FREE. Some examples of their work can be reviewed at:

http://www.masonicartbook.com/ads/Software_Leadership_Advertisements.html

Dirk: Prove that it works better than other SEO practices. As of late, there has been much more said suggesting link exchange practices have been discounted than not. I agree there IS value in exchanging links. As I mentioned above, if you, or any agent, ask me to exchange I'll do it but I certainly won't spend the time to seek out sites to exchange with. In the time it takes to search out a new exchange partner, contact them (either submit my info or email them), verify they added my link, add their link, check regularly that they are still linked to me, etc. I could have blogged several posts on A|R or other sites that provide my site with MUCH higher results. And I certainly won't pay for this type of SEO. I'd rather pay someone $x per month to write content to be posted somewhere relevant.

There are forums, blog sites, article exchange programs that bring better results than being one of 50 other links on some other agent's buried "referral partners" page. I suppose if MSN or Google would exchange links on their home page I would hop all over it. That isn't the case. Agents and others who are willing to exchange links aren't interested in having users leave THEIR site so after they've buried the page where your link is located you're lucky if you can find your own link - and you know what you are looking for. These pages are typically worth very little to search engines. Many of them are not cached/indexed and many don't have a page rank/value of any sort. They pass along little to no value. That being said, why would I spend time or money investing in a practice that brings little return? Sounds discounted to me.

Christian: Right on, man! Now you're talking. If an agent wants to spend the time or money exchanging links yours is a great approach. The agent's link must be in a relevant spot as in a "natural link". Even A|R gives more points for a home page return link than for a link from another page. They are urging users to place them on highly visible pages instead of the typical 4 or 5 page deep link. In search for great advice for us all, how do you recommend that agents find sites who will also take the time to place these natural links in their content?

One concept that comes to mind is coined "peripheral marketing". It is based on the idea that to effectively reach the center (customer), you should focus on the outside boundaries, or in other words, pathways to the center. The key is to reach the customer prior to the actual decision process. The further they are from their "center" the better. Think seven steps before a homebuyer makes the decision to buy or sell a home. That is where you want to focus marketing efforts. To make this happen, an understanding of the differences between marketing and advertising is crucial.

To directly answer your question about how agents should find sites that will place natural links in content, well, that would be a big answer and sparks some ideas for my next Active Rain blog post. However, I will share some thoughts here. It is not so much about finding a "site". It is more about finding an advertising partner, or a sound business. A "web site owner" should be an established business. Some kid in Montana sitting in their basement managing a web site is not really going to be interested in placing a real estate link in their content. Agents and Brokers should be able to identify businesses that may want to work with them on marketing campaigns and they should be able to distinguish between "good" and "bad" web sites.

Agents that are looking to build a family of "natural links" need to research and identify businesses that might benefit from the association. If there is a mutual benefit, then they have something to "sell" when making the proposal. In the end it is all about presentation and thinking out-of-the-box.

Christian: We're listening...please come back and place a link to your blog from this post so our readers can follow along...I look forward to the post...

Since Jagger, I haven't seen very many sites that rely heavily on reciprocal linking do well.

One thing is very clear, reciprocal linking and other un-natural linking campaigns have been consistently de-valued over the last couple of years.

Here is a quote from Matt Cutts:

"For example, if someone’s doing a co-op link exchange, or buying links, or reciprocal linking to excess, that’s the sort of thing where those links might not be counting as much as they used to." (there are hundreds of similar quotes by Matt and other famous SEO's)

Win:

I'm going to respectfully disagree with you. This comment couldn't be farther from the truth: "Let's not go down the road that "good content" will generate large numbers of one-way links."

I'm sorry, but that is just a ridiculous statement. Just look at the top 50 real estate blogs... do you think that they are successful because they exchange links, therefore providing good ranking, and therefore becoming popular?? No. It's all about the content! It has always been about the content.

Even if Google hasn't penalized sites for excessive link exchanging, they probably will in the near future. They have stated publicly in a number of different ways that they hate it, and any other unnatural ways that people use to "game" the system. They want quality keyword rich content, and authoritative links.

There are plenty of people that claim that they actually were penalized, or at least took a dive in rankings after Jagger, and claim that it was due to reciprocal linking. It's not just a rumor, there are real professional SEO's that believe in this wholeheartedly. Just read for a couple of minutes on WMW, or on SEOMOZ.

Personally, I think that there are so many pitfalls to link exchanging that, it should just be avoided. There are plenty of ways to get quality links without wasting your time getting listed on crappy PR0 webpages that have 300 other links.

Justin:

You wrote - "I'm sorry, but that is just a ridiculous statement. Just look at the top 50 real estate blogs... do you think that they are successful because they exchange links, therefore providing good ranking, and therefore becoming popular?? No. It's all about the content! It has always been about the content."

I have never said that a client's web site's success is only due to linking. As to content, I have written several times here and elsewhere, it is all about well-optimized content... not just content. And you can mention the top 50 real estate blogs if you like, but I am talking about the Top 10 or Top 20 real estate agent or broker web sites in very competitive major metropolitan marketplaces. (Unfortunately, we have to weed out the large national directories or the listing aggregator sites - Homegain.com, Houses.com, Trulia.com, etc. - that are crowding out the the local individual agents and company sites on first pages of Google and Yahoo! in order to focus on these individual site rankings). Most agents don't have the time or the inclination to write blogs - hopefully most are out selling and listing houses instead. Heck, most of them can't even write good content for their own web pages. Just read some and you will agree. Ha! If ActiveRain is any model to hold up, it only has 2% of the REALTORS throughout the US as members and I dare say, most of them are "lurkers", not "publishers" here.

However, many of my real estate web clients are in very competitive real estate marketplaces - in the Northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, the Chicago suburbs, in Orange County California, and elsewhere who are either in the Top 10 or Top 20 in Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live for extremely competitive search phrases. They have good, white-hat SEO techniques on every page of their sites that I have incorporated right into their HTML coding, they have dynamic MLS search sections on their sites to provide changing content, and they also use professionally maintained (not amateur) link directories - which all combined to help them to achieve and now maintain their rankings. They don't constantly change their text. They don't need to, (if the text is well-optimized to begin with). They aren't constantly adding new pages - there is nothing to add. And they aren't sitting around writing blogs - they don't have the time or skills (most salespeople are orators, not writers). Yet they maintain their overall positioning or gain in postioning month after month after month. So I do have the clients to prove it. Feel free to contact me and I will be happy to share those with you. Now show me Top 10 ranked real estate agent sites in major metropolitan area markets that don't have some kind of reciprocal link directory! They are few and far between.

We have all seen the Web dramatically change over time. In fact, it is still in its infancy - not even a toddler yet. Goodness, in 1994, there were only a handful of real estate sites even on the Web. Over 5 years ago, no one had ever heard of Google! Who knows what we will be doing 5 years from now to attain rankings or even who the next "Google" is going to be? (I know it will certainly be different out there and it sure keeps me on my toes.... part of the fun.) So you can say that this doesn't work, but for Today, I have the client rankings to prove otherwise.

MAR

2007

Win: It certainly sounds like your the man for the job for a link exchange program because multiple companies I've talked with recently are employing other types of link programs other than simple link exchange. Are you interested in sharing a post with your exchange methods including link management, estimated time involved, and verbage for requesting an exchange? Please post a link to it in this post so readers can follow along.

Also, what are your fees for doing this professionally for an agent?

A little bit of perspective.

You have found ways to get links other than reciprocation. That is all good. There are a lot of ways to get links. I do not sit here and tell you that what you do does not work.

Please give me the same courtesy. We have hundreds of clients. They did not get busted back during any Google updates. Florida, Jagger, Big Daddy, whatever. Most gained positions in those updates. We also review the sites that we link with. By and large, they also held up very well.

I am talking about sites that use reciprocation as their primary means of building links, and many of them I have been watching for YEARS.

Sure, sites that reciprocated got busted back in various updates. I always wonder what else they were doing. So did sites that did not reciprocate. By and large, they got replaced by sites that...reciprocate!

That is a pervasive condition in real estate search. The top ranking local agent sites use reciprocation to build their link popularity.

Heck, let's pick some terms, and have a look. I have no fear of doing that. I do it all the time for new prospective clients who are not ranking. I look at SERPs for their primary terms, and look at the top ranking local agent sites, and most of the time (not always, but usually) you'll find a concerted effort to reciprocate.

Now, as you mentioned, reciprocation is not "easy". It takes work. It is a data management challenge. Tools like LinksManager can reduce the pain considerably.

But all methods of building links take work. Choose your weapons, and do it.

But, from considerable experience, I can state quite assuredly, with examples (I will not reveal my own clients here unless they do it themselves) that reciprocation does work, when it's done right. The evidence is everywhere.

Some people don't like it. Some people don't do it. Then they can find other methods of building links. Whatever works for them.

But, as someone who does reciprocation work all day, every day, and has many marketing agencies and clients with multiple domains that continue to bring new clients to us, if what we do here did not work, they'd stop doing that, don't you think?

I really don't care how many SEO gurus claim that reciprocation is "discounted". I have seen those arguments for years. SEO gurus have been making that claim for a long time. It;s become a religion to them to make that claim.

Most of those people haven't reciprocated for years. How do they know what works and what doesn't, if they have no current experience at it? Just because they claim to be "experts"? Most "experts" in SEO are experts at only one thing...and that is self promotion.

Anyhow, let's pick some local real estate terms in some competitive markets, and see what's up. For my part, I'll only discuss markets where I don't have current clients.

thx

Hi Darren!

My favorite SEO company, Step Forth (www.stepforth.com) in Canada turned me on to Domain Drivers (www.domaindrivers.com) a couple of years back when they recommended that my clients might want to consider some kind of reciprocal link exchange program as well. I was a little sceptical too, but Step Forth had achieved great rankings for my clients who had consulted with them and implemented their site recommendations. So I took their advice and began to offer it to my clients as an optional program to consider incorporating into their sites. Now, some of my custom web site clients have not opted to go this extra step, but over 25 of them have hired Domain Drivers to manage this program for their site. I put my clients directly in touch with Domain Drivers to discuss with them their fees that they charge and how the program works. Should they elect to go ahead, I merely coordinate with Domain Drivers on how to incorporate it into the site.

I don't play "favorites" in how I design a custom site - especally since I have multiple clients in the same marketplaces competing with each other. I treat all of them like it is my "team" of sites vs. the World (like a good real estate sales manager - which I was for 22 years). And my clients appreciate that fair approach. But interestingly, I have found that, with rare exception, those clients who opted to now incorporate a link directory that is professionally managed are certainly out ranking my other clients who have not gone that extra mile. The site contents are all very similar and I work with each client to fine-tune it. The SEO techniques I incorporate into their HTML page coding are virtually identical - targeted to their individual marketplace. So the only variable that I have seen to explain why these client sites are consistently coming up higher in the search engines over my other clients is either having or not having a link directory.

"I build them... they link them!" Ha! Hope that helps.

Dirk: Thanks for the perspective. I'm glad the efforts you have made in recip linking has paid off. Readers are open to any tips and ideas you may want to post.

Win: Thanks for the insight.

After a discussion like this on a real estate agent site I realize we are sure a bunch of geeks! ha ha!

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