What are Reciprocal Links and What do Search Engines Think of Them?
When web sites link to each other, either directly or indirectly through a number of different pages, a search engine might consider those links to be reciprocal links. If you're familiar with some of the mythology and folklore surrounding search engine optimization, you may have read or heard that reciprocal links are bad, and that search engines don't like them.
The truth is more complicated than that.
What about blogs that link to each other on every page in their blog rolls? Or links between sites owned by the same owner that are reasonable, such as a storefront on a different domain, or a blog at a different domain or subdomain associated with a site, or a group of sites from the same company or organization that focus upon different topics?
What about sites that cover similar topics or provide complementary goods or services and find that it's helpful to link to each other for the benefit of their visitors?
What do search engines think of resource pages, where sites include pages of links and descriptions to other sites that they think their visitors might find helpful and useful? What happens if some of those sites link back? Does it make a difference if those resource pages include a statement on them that they will list your site on their page in exchange for a reciprocal link back?
Search Engine Warnings on Links Between Pages
The major commercial search engines do provide some information about linking in their guidelines:
Google's page on Link Schemes warns site owners that some kinds of linking might impact the ratings of their web sites negatively, including:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
Yahoo, in their Search Content Quality Guidelines, provides examples of content that they don't want included in their search engine, such as:
- Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (link schemes)
Windows Live Help, in their page on Guidelines for successful indexing, include amongst their list of "techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results," the following:
- Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.
How helpful are these guidelines to most searchers or webmasters or bloggers?
Chances are that some percentage of the people who use Google, or have their websites indexed by the search engine are familiar with PageRank, but may not know what these guidelines mean by "link schemes" or "link farms".
Why are search engines so concerned about links between pages?
Classifications for Search Ranking Signals
When you perform a search at a search engine, the pages that show up in response to your search appear are ranked and ordered by the search engine based upon a large number of signals used by the search engine to try to provide you with pages that might best match up with what you intended to find on the Web.
That kind of ranking is a challenge for search engines because there can often be many thousands or millions of pages that might contain the words that you used to perform your search. They want to try to provide the best pages that they can at the top of the results, or at least better pages than the other search engines are showing.
These different signals that a search engine might used to determine the order of pages in search results could be classified a few different ways.
Content Based, Link Based, and User Behavior Based Ranking Signals
One set of classifications consists of breaking those signals into three different types: content based, link based, and user behavior based.
Content based signals look at the actual content that appears upon the pages of a web site. Link based signals pay attention to the links between your site and other sites on the web. User based signals look at data that indicates how people might react to the pages of your site, whether they are viewing the site directly, or seeing it in search results at a search engine.
Query Dependant and Query Independant Ranking Signals
Another way that search engines might classify the signals that they use to rank pages can depend upon whether or not that signal is related to a query that you might use to search with or not. This way of classifying those signals breaks them down into two different groupings - how important they might consider a page to be, and how relevant a page might be to a specific search term or phrase.
Signals that look at the importance, or "quality" of a page might look at the quality of the content of a page, or the number and perceived importance of links to that page, or how people use the page such as bookmarking it, spending time on it, annotating it in some way, or using it in some manner that might not be tied to a specific query. These kinds of signals for ranking a page are often referred to by search engines as query independant signals, because they don't rely upon a query that might have been used to find that page.
Signals that look at the relevance of a page might look at how relevant that page might be to a specific query term or phrase, what words might appear in links pointing to the phrase and in words surrounding those links and associated with them, and in how people might use the page in a way that is associated with a specific query term or phrase such as clicking on a link to the page when it appears in search results for a specific search for a specific term or phrase, or spending a certain amount of time on that page after a search brings them to it. These kinds of signals for ranking a page are often referred to by search engines as query dependant signals because they do rely upon a specific query used to find a page.
Mixing Signals and Reordering Page Rankings
A search engine can use a mix of a good number of signals to determine in which order it might show pages to searchers in response to a search. It might also take those ordered results and reorder them before presenting them to searchers based upon other factors involving those pages, such as which country the searcher might be from, which language they have indicated they prefer to see results in, and many others.
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