SE optomisation ~ reciprocal links?

[Egg Bramhill]

In this THREAD the member has created a site with a links page from his electronics products shop. The links are completely unassociated with his sites products and his wares. The only purpose of such obscure links can be to optimise's search engine ranking.

Firstly I wouldn't want to create a site that uses such scattergun meaningless links nor would I want to offer visitors such a confusing and meaningless chance to leave a site I'd created and struggled hard to optimise for SEO.

I'm well aware that SE's now weigh reciprocal links quite heavily but how do other members view these reciprocal link services.

Should SE's weigh these links so heavily? I view them in the same way as searching for a "taxi" in "Boston" and being flooded with further directories (sub search engines) of meaningless taxi directories. Of course you can change Taxi for Hotel and Boston for Glasgow.

I'd be interested in other folks opinions.

[steve.ledger]

The hidden links appear to have now been removed by the owner of the site.

[Egg Bramhill]

Steve, I'm not talking about these deleted hidden links, just the bog standard links on the links page. They're served up by a SEO link agency and bear no relation to the members electronics site.

Here's the link

[steve.ledger]

[Jimi King]

The way I understood it, search engines tend to treat reciprocal links as cancelling each other out.

Hence if you receive an offer of a reciprocal link from somebody just bin it, even if they lead you to a page where your site is already listed "as a goodwill gesture". Because that page will doubtless be excluded from being crawled in the robots.txt file for that domain. If not it will undoubtedly disappear very shortly after you put up a link back.

[RTK]

Basically what JK said... Random link requests is a waste of time. Especially when they are "farmed" and have no real "value" to the site and its content/visitors. E.g. Why would a ping pong site link to a Cialis site? It doesn't make any sense. If a regular dude can see a "scheme" - you can bet your last dollar on the fact that Google can do the same in one nano-second.

Their whole livelyhood is based on "search" integrity. They will figure out (if they haven't done so already) if links are a "real endorsement" or a pathetic attempt to manipulate the search results.

Who knows if reciprocal links still work? IMO, it doesn't have to be a bad thing... Similar sites pointing to each other doesn't have to be an "evil" attempt at manipulation. The point could simply be to let your visitors find things you think is worthile and useful.

I'm sure certain "fiddling" might work for a while... but eventually a filter is put in place and you have wasted your time (or worse - you also get punished for it). In all, it's probably better to just do your "thing" and what happens - happens. In any case, it's much more rewarding to just do your site and not worry about search engines. I mean, if your site is "crap" - visitors will turn at the door anyway, no matter how many links point to it.

Risto

[pauland]

I'm sure certain "fiddling" might work for a while...

Yes, that's what keeps these SEO companies in business - "I'll get you to the top of google within a week" - most people taking up that offer don't understand that it'll be a short lived feat at some expense.

One client of mine was approached by a SEO company who offered to divert people to his site, by redirecting them there even though they weren't intentionally going there. I'd better stop now..

I think the problem with links/reciprocal links it inevitably leads to a distortion where people artificially create the conditions that can fool google that a particular site is popular or the best fit. I suspect that no matter what google does there'll always be a way to distort the search results artificially.