Some Dirty Tricks with Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links used to be the ‘cats meow’ for improving ranking of your website. They are much diminished in effectiveness these days, but they are still useful to some degree. The idea that reciprocal links cancel each other out like some algebraic equation is simply not true. I know this to be so because several of the sites I optimize have reciprocal links that show up in the Google backlinks check. They only show a handful of the total links back-linking to your site, but if these reciprocals were worthless Google would not list them. Reciprocals are still useful and can help boost your total back-link counts. The real issue is how they are done.
When looking to trade links with a reciprocal partner you need to wary of some dirty tricks or just plain bad ideas.
Bad Ideas
1. Discounted Pages – a page on a website called “links.html”, “resources.html” or similar may be discounted by the SE’s based on the file name alone. Why? Google is not stupid, that’s why. These file names are heavily abused, so even honest link traders can’t use them. So, don’t accept links for a trade on a page like that.
2. Just links – Even if the name of the file is something less telling than “Links.php”, if it is just a page of links, it can’t be very good. The best kind of link is a in-text link. One where the link to the outbound site is part of a sentence or paragraph. Being in a list of links can make the page discounted by the SE’s and render all the links totally useless.
Dirty Tricks!
There are many dirty tricks that some webmasters use to turn what appears to be a reciprocal link into a one-way link for themselves.
1. “NoFollow” Link – The nofollow attribute was implemented by Google to help eliminate link spam. What this attribute (supposedly) does is tell the search engine, “here’s a link, but don’t follow it, don’t count it as a valid backlink, and don’t pass any page rank (PR) to it.” This can be useful in controlling the “link juice” of your pages. Placing nofollow on links to certain internal pages of you own website can be a good idea if those pages should not be indexed by the search engines. Contact us, or login pages are the best example. This can also be useful with blogs and other sites where linksters like to spam comments with their links. Makeing them ‘nofollow’ will nullify the effectiveness and keep your blog clean.
BUT! For reciprocal link exchanges neither link in such an arrangement should be nofollow. Why? because its no longer an even trade. If a trade partner offers you a link with ‘nofollow’ activated, they aren’t playing fair. To check for this, I recommend two methods.
- Automatic – Mozilla Firefox has a plugin that automatically checks every link on the page for nofollow attribute. Every link will get a color overlay, purple or blue means “do follow”, pink means “nofollow”. So you can quickly see on any page if the link is a nofollow link.
- Manual – Using your web browser (firefox recommended) you can look up the source code and find your link in HTML code. If it says, ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ in the <a> tag, then its no good. Firefox allows you to select a section of the page and then look at the source code for that section only. This is easier than scanning through the whole page.
One additional thing to watch out for with regards to the nofollow attribute; you need to check back in a few weeks and check again in a few months to see if your trading partner double-crossed you. Some evil webmasters offer the trade with a dofollow link, but change it later figuring your won’t bother to check it again. Check it again, and again! There are some link checking tools available on the web that can check it automatically. Just do a Google or Yahoo search.
2. NoFollow <meta> tag – Just like the nofollow links mentioned above, a webmaster can make an entire page “nofollow” by adding a <meta> tag called “robots”. In the <head> section of the page are <meta> tags which tell the search engines certain “extra” information that is not seen on the page in the browser. One of these is <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” /> -This is common, and as it is, is not a problem as it is telling the search engines to index this page and follow the links. But, one can change it to read <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> This version is telling the search engines to IGNORE this page. The major SE’s abide by this meta tag and will skip this page and not index it or follow any links on it. So, if this is done on a reciprocal link page it will render your back-link useless. Check the page you are going to have your link posted on for this <meta> tag.
3. Robots.txt block - This is the dirtiest of all. Many people fail to check this file, let alone even know about it. The above two methods are common, and many people already know about them so webmasters who want to play dirty, can’t get away with it. So, they came up with another way.. Robots.txt file. This file is intended to allow or disallow search engine bots (spiders) from accessing certain parts of your website. This is good if you have backup folders, or other files and folders that you do not want to show up in the search engines.
But, some evil webmasters will add a line to block access to the reciprocal page (or folder) so that the major search engines will not access it. The real trick here is that if you check for ‘nofollow’ links, manually or automatically with software, everything will appear kosher. Most people don’t think to check the robots file. But you must!
To check this file, it will be in the root of the website (http://www.thedomain.com/robots.txt). you can view it in any browser. Some sites don’t use it at all, so if it does not come up, its not there. When it does come up, you want to look for a line similar to this: “Disallow: /link-page.html “. This is telling the SE’s that they are FORBIDDEN from accessing this page; and the major ones listen. So Google or Yahoo won’t access that page and thus, your link will never be seen by the search engines. ‘Pretty sneaky, eh’!
Well, I am sure there are other dirty tricks with reciprocal links used by evil webmasters, but these are the ones I have seen and check for constantly. Once again, checking for this at the time of the trade is good, but remember to check back several times to see if they have employed these tactics after the fact.
Hope this helps, good linking!
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