Common SEO Strategy that does not work
Don’t take the link bait
We have all seen emails from other webmasters requesting a reciprocal link exchange to help you boost your SEO and get more visitors to your website; however, this will end up hurting you rather than helping you. From 2003-2009 a trend among webmasters and SEO companies was to employ reciprocal link building as an attempt to promote your website.
The basic ideas was to put my website link on your page, and I’ll put yours on mine.
Google is constantly updating their algorythm to provide better information that will cater to a better user experience and recognized this unnatural trend of link building. Links on the net are like votes, but not all links are worth the same weight. Although quantity of links is important, it is far more important to have high quality links pointing to your website.
Reciprocal link building is unnatural, and not particularly organic if you truly think about it. Google wants to promote unique, new and creative information that consequently grabs peoples attention and creates natural human interest. It is all about the user experience and promoting the best, highest quality content. Reciprocal link building does none of this.
Most SEO companies continue to use reciprocal link building, link buying, and other methods to manipulate page rank and increase your rankings in the search engines. This type of link building strategy is bad for business and does not create traffic from prospective customers. It produces the lowest quality of traffic that is typically defined as “Junk traffic.”
However this is not to say that purchasing a link on a successful relevant website or directory to get your company out there will not work, but it should not be your primary strategy for increasing traffic to your website.
Not all paid links violate Google’s guidelines. A very important link that every website should consider buying is a placement in the Yahoo Directory.
Buying and selling links is a natural part of the economy of the web when done for attracting targeted traffic; not for manipulation of search results. Reciprocal link building is a clear violation of the spirit of producing high quality content and Google has taken actions to ensure that you will no longer benefit from reciprocal links.
Google Webmaster Tools has published information about link exchanges and when they deem reciprocal links to be excessive or unnatural, you get no credit and risk penalization.
