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What Backlinks Count For What

April 4th, 2009 |

: Image via Wikipedia

There have been many discussions and there are still many different theories on backlinks and what they give you and what they don’t.

We know links are important and I have already discussed the issue of who links to you and who you link to, but I was asked by a client about reciprocal linking so I did a bit of investigation before confirming my views.

I did some research and came back to Matt Cutts’s blog, as I so often do. In summary I could not find much info on reciprocal linking, but stumbled on a very interesting post about ‘paid links for passing pagerank‘. Matt stated …

Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example.

He then went on to say …

The Forrester report discusses a recent “sponsored conversation” from Kmart, but I doubt whether mentions that even in that small test, Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.

So, what did we learn here? Google wants to see natural linking. It does not want you to link to someone because they paid you to. Why? Because they want to provide relevant and unbiased content to thir searchers. This method of giving their searchers the relevant unbiased information has earned them approx 48% of the search market. Due to all their extra activities, like Adsense and Adwords, you can understand why they do not want to loose their market share.

To prove thier point they even penalised themselves. Their Japanese site was getting links to themselves that did not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute. You can read more about it here.

Also, Matt’s post mentioned an ‘paid’ article about brain tumours. I live in France and they are talking about making any website with health related items on illegal, unless they get checked over by the person in charge of the health here.

If you want to learn more about Google’s quality guidelines, you can see them here. They can and do follow though on these things.

So, with regards to reciprocal linking …

It seems that it is not frowned upon, but one way links are better. The thing with reciprocal linking too, is that you have to check that the links back to you are still there and that the sites are not now in bad neighbourhoods. In my opinion it is better to use one of these ‘3 way linking’ programs. I use Neurolinker on my sites and have found that the slow growth looks and feels more natural than other programs. Don’t go mad though, get only relevant links.

What are you using on your sites, if anything, and how is it going?