Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

Register Log in
  • Congratulations gkittelson on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Reciprocal links

Status
Not open for further replies.
inusrat

inusrat

Programmer
Feb 28, 2004
308
CA
Hi,

I was reading an article about optimization. It talks about
puting links on your website to other website who are providing same type of services that you are. It also says that you should ask them if they can put your link on their website... I hope I got the right concept of "Reciprocal links". I have few questions.

1. How worth while this practice is?

2. How many link should be decent a number?

3. Do you think it is a bad idea to put so many links, I mean it will ruin you website design?

4. Are their lot of website doing this for search engine optimiization?

5. Don'you think it is abad idea to put your competitors link (basically ad) on your page, bcz you are basically directing people to their site from your website?

Thanks
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Probably the advice was not to ask competitors for links, but to check where their get backlinks from and request links there.

1. reciprocal links are all very well but non reciprocal are better. reports from the London SES suggest google devalue (slightly) certain reciprocal links and too many links from one place.

2. not really a decent number If you are going down the link, link, link route you'll always be looking for more.

3. split links up on to different pages so all links stay in page context.

4. yes

5 not always, your site may gain "authority" status and your visitors may get good information and remember where the found the link.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
The most important thing to consider (by far) when deciding whether to add a link is "is this link of interest/use to my visitors?". Adding useful links is going to make yours a better site - a site that people will visit more often, a site that they will link to themselves without your prompting.

Don't obsess about whether this or that will add 0.0001 to your page rank. Google change the rules all the time anyway. Just concentrate on making a site that's appealing to people.

-- Chris Hunt
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Just found this posted at another forum.


pretty sound reasoning. Not all SERP competitors are business competition.

on Googles "rules" I saw a quote from Jill Whalen the other day, can't find right now to attribute it properly.

Basically it was, "Googles rules haven't changed, the methods they use to apply them just gets better"



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Hi,

Thanks for your reply. One thinhg I wanted to clarify in your message you said:

"reciprocal links are all very well but non reciprocal are better"

What is non reciprocal link?, does that mean someone else put a link to your site but you don't put link to their site?

Thanks
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Hi,

I was reading somewhere where they say that your <HTML> title will be the first thing on your page. I am assuming that if you have code on top of <HTML> and if it remains on the server side like ASP, it will be ok. I am quite sure they are talking about the code coming on client side should have <HTML> the first thing.

But If I have some thing like the following

********
<!-- include file: variable to check if the page is home page -->
<html>
<head>
<title>???????</title>

*******
..a comment coming out from a ASP include file... .will that be a bad practice?




Secondly the link you mailed they talk about using heading tags like.<H1> . Instead of using headings tags if one use the font size and make the text size bigger, do you think it will produce the same results?

Thanks
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
the title doesn't have to be the first thing on the page just as long as it is between the <head></head> tags.

ASP/PHP code above, below or in between the <html> makes no difference at all as it doesn't get seen by the browser. (Given that it doesn't write to the page above the <html> of course.) Setting variables, sessions and cookies etc is fine. Only thing that gets to the browser is anything that follows a response.write statement or anything outside the code delimiter tags.

the <hn> tags are given a little more weight because when used correctly they are there for document structure, and to give the visitor\viewer some indication of the page or paragraph contents, using a change of font size will make no difference it will still just be body text.

The upshot is you should write and structure your page for your visitors NOT the SEs, do this and the SEs will like the page as well. and by doing this you won't be forever "algo chasing" because unlike the latest and greatest theories it will keep on working, and your rankings are less likely to disappear with every tweak of the SEs algo.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks for your message. I have some javascript functrions and stylesheet in the <head></head> tags. I know it is a good idea to put Javascript and stylesheet i seperate files. But does it make any difference from "Search engine" point of view if you have do not have Javascript and stylesheet in seperate file?

Thanks
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
From the point of view that it adds overhead to the page size and therefore increases load time for dial-up visitors it's not a good idea. And having a style sheet in every page makes no sense really and defeats the object of CSS.
Also having external scripts and styles means they are only downloaded once and cached.

For crawlers, they have a size limit that they retrieve on the page visit (101K for Google) and if the scripts and style code take it above this, chunks of your content may not be crawled.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks a lot... The link you recommended


was very helpful. I think now I have fairly good idea as what to do to optimize the website. I will go ahead and apply these tips to my clients websites. I found another very good website about optimization for someone new to optimization and trying to learn optimization.


Thanks
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

PauleyB
  • Locked
  • Question
Links not working in Admin Console
Replies
0
Views
72
PauleyB
PauleyB
DrySnot
  • Locked
  • Question
How to use Anchor Links 1
Replies
2
Views
47
DrySnot
DrySnot
leeboycymru
  • Locked
  • Question
Google sponsored links
Replies
8
Views
85
1DMF
1DMF
leeboycymru
  • Locked
  • Question
Sites I can check my competitors in bound links
Replies
4
Views
62
ChrisHirst
ChrisHirst
misstc
  • Locked
  • Question
Good WebSphere links
Replies
0
Views
35
misstc
misstc

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top