Do local reciprocal backlinks do any good these days?

[JimFranco]

I remember recips not being such a good strategy for awhile now. But, how about for local seo ?

 

[Cherie Dickey]

Re: Does local reciprocal backlinks do any good these days

Hi!

Reciprocal linking isn't always a bad thing, and it's not always a good thing. The key is relevance to your own site, and quality of the sites and pages linking back to you (and you linking to them).

Here's a thread I located here that has a lot of great advice: Reciprocal Linking - bad?


-Cherie

 

[djbaxter]

Re: Does local reciprocal backlinks do any good these days

That's a nice article, Cherie.

Two points I would add, though:

First point: Google has repeatedly issued comments about being careful about guest posts and basically recommended you avoid them. For example, Matt Cutts warned about them back in 2014 in The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO.

More here from Matt (an earlier Q&A video from 2012 where he is less directive but still warning about the practice):

[video=youtube_share;IMxC3wQZOyc]https://youtu.be/IMxC3wQZOyc[/video]

John Mueller tells us that if we are going to accept guest blogging, any links should be nofollow, which means that the guest poster may get some traffic from his post but won't get any link juice (see around 10.54 into the Hangout):

[video=youtube_share;ixPFGXYUwNM]https://youtu.be/ixPFGXYUwNM[/video]

Referenced in Are you confused about guest posting? Here's what Google says you can safely do. - Marie Haynes Consulting:

In February of 2013 John was asked by someone who was in real estate whether it was acceptable to guest blog to get some links to his site. John responded with the following:

Think about whether or not this is a link that would be on your site if it weren’t for your actions…When it comes to guest blogging it’s a situation where you are placing links on other people’s sites together with this content, so that’s something I kind of shy away from purely from a linkbuilding point of view. It can make sense to guest blog on other people’s sites to drive some traffic to your site…but you should use a nofollow.”

​

John was also asked about a situation where someone guest posted for the Huffington post, which is a well respected and authoritative site. The question was whether or not the links back to their site should be nofollowed. John’s answer was that they should be nofollowed because they are not natural links.

Rand Fishkin also makes some excellent points in Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope - Whiteboard Friday - Moz:

people forget all the time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that's good content, especially if it's stuff that's really earning traffic and visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else's site. Somebody else is earning most of the attention awareness, and granted some of that is transferring on to you and that's why we do guest posting. But you have to be aware of that, and that leads me into some flawed assumptions.

Flawed assumption number one: More links are always better. This is not the case. This is not the case. I have seen many, many sites with just a few, a handful, a few dozen to a few hundred great links far outranking their brethren with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. All links are not created equal.

Takeaway: You need to be careful and cautious about whether you accept guest posts at all and which guest posts you accept. Quality control is essential if you're going to do this. And make sure any outgoing links are nofollow. For the guest poster, be aware that while publication of one of your guest posts may help with brand recognition and with traffic, it probably will not help with ranking.

Second point: Not all links from another site are equal in value, even when they are not nofollow. First, the relevance of content on the other site to your site is critical. Additionally, the overall quality and "authority" of content on that other site matters. And where those links are located matters: sitewide footer links won't help you at all and large numbers of links that all have the same anchor text will likely be seen as "unnatural links" and will add much value to your overall link profile.

Beyond this, if you are considering a request for reciprocal links, check to see how many other outgoing links are on the page where your link would be placed. In essence, the amount of PageRank passing to a single outgoing dofollow link is a function of the PageRank of the page containing your link divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page (including internal navigation links and possibly including nofollow links - that second part has never been very clear). So, even if you are able to get a dofollow link on a well ranked page, if you are one of a hundred links on that page the value to you will probably be very small.

 

[Cherie Dickey]

Thanks djbaxter!

I updated my thread while you were typing this it seems. My original thoughts were about the first part of the article... I thought better of sharing it though since it does have advice on HOW to get those links via guest blogging, and that advice is questionable, as you've shown.

I thought I edited it to a forum discussion quickly enough, but you're faster than i am! HAHA! Sorry about that!

Here's the original article I removed, for anyone reading
https://www.seomark.co.uk/exchanging-links-with-other-websites/

 

[djbaxter]

More on the issue of guest posting - maybe it's more complicated than we thought?

Is Ditching Guest Posting The Right Choice?
SearchEnginePeople.com
June 26, 2018

"Guest blogging is done." This statement made in 2014 by the-then-head of Google Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts, caused a lot of controversy at the time.

Was Google about to start penalizing those who engaged in the practice?

Could suddenly guest posting cause you more harm than good?

Was it better to ditch it as a marketing strategy?

Matt later clarified that the point he was making in his post had been largely missed. He was not referring to legitimate guest posts at all, but rather to the practice of spammy guest posts designed merely to create as many backlinks as possible....

Guest blogging today, according to Forbes, should be used as a tool to build credibility rather than backlinks. Blatantly promotional posts have lost their allure for readers. You still can stick to one or two links in the content, but use your bio as means to help people find your business.

 

[adammaxum]

here's the best way to do reciprocal link building...

I'll imagine this is a local business trying to get links on organization/charity/event 3rd party websites....because that's the proper way to build links that make sense for a local biz.

most of the time, these 3rd party sites will link to you via your logo and not ever ask to be linked back to.

IF someone requests you link back... hope they don't understand SEO enough so that you can add a no-follow tag to the link you place on your website back to them. This way you don't get in trouble and it's more beneficial for your company/website.

You can also place a link back to them from an interior web page instead of your homepage which can also be beneficial.