Link Swaps - Are They Black Hat?

by carolm

Posted: 11 years ago 12 replies

I've been getting a few people asking if I'd like to do a link swap with them. Their sites usually have a long list of 'Friendly Sites' (or similar wording) in their sidebar.

Don't you risk a Panda smack-down if you use these types of arrangements?

I was quite %^%$ (insert adjective of choice) to see that one site had been in existence for only one month, had only 3 short articles, a long list of Friendly Sites in their sidebar (maybe 40), and a Page Rank of 3!

How is that even possible?

Why would Google favor such a site in view of the Panda and Penguin updates, and their stated guidelines of rewarding quality content?

#black #hat #link #swaps

gabibeowulf

11 years ago

Well, their guidelines are just... guidelines, not rules.

Panda has nothing to do with link exchanges.. or links in particular. It's an algorithm that detects low quality content and applies penalties.

Penguin on the other hand deals with over optimization. If the site has used branding terms as anchor text keywords it will not receive a penalty, as it's not particularly trying to game the system.

Sure, in the long run if the only types of backlinks that the site receives are from unrelated sites obtained via link exchange, there will be some sort of penalty.

Anyway, I'm biased here, but "rewarding quality content" is a myth they like to propagate. I have never seen a document rank for anything even medium competitive if it's not promoted, but I have seen crappy content rank just because of the promotion, so the facts kinda speak for themselves.

-Gabriel

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Linkology

11 years ago

Originally Posted by gabibeowulf

Anyway, I'm biased here, but "rewarding quality content" is a myth they like to propagate. I have never seen a document rank for anything even medium competitive if it's not promoted, but I have seen crappy content rank just because of the promotion, so the facts kinda speak for themselves.

-Gabriel

Well said, this is exactly how I see it as well.

Thanks

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Gareth Mailer 11 years ago

Originally Posted by gabibeowulf

Panda has nothing to do with link exchanges.. or links in particular. It's an algorithm that detects low quality content and applies penalties.

-Gabriel

In that regards it does have to do with off-site, have you seen the amount of low-quality spun crap which has been de-indexed from GoArticles.com etc lately?

Obviously, content de-indexed from PUBLIC blog networks and "content farms" ultimately means off-site consequences, albeit in a round-about way...
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Alexa Smith

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by carolm

Don't you risk a Panda smack-down if you use these types of arrangements?

No. "Reciprocal backlinking" has been largely ignored since long before the first of the Panda updates (as Matt Cutts has openly explained). There may be no value in it, at all. But that's different from being penalized, of course.

Originally Posted by carolm

I was quite %^%$ (insert adjective of choice) to see that one site had been in existence for only one month, had only 3 short articles, a long list of Friendly Sites in their sidebar (maybe 40), and a Page Rank of 3!

How is that even possible?

Why wouldn't it be? Page ranks don't mean anything significant toward SERP's rankings anyway, these days: we can all see this for ourselves from the ever-increasing regularity with which low-PR pages outrank high-PR pages in Google's SERP's (and from the fact that Google says so).

Originally Posted by carolm

Why would Google favor such a site in view of the Panda and Penguin updates, and their stated guidelines of rewarding quality content?

Impossible to say without seeing the site and analysing its on-page and off-page SEO, and impossible to say confidently even then. But it's beyond question that Google significantly rewards high-quality content, exactly as it says. People imagining that that's a myth either live on another planet or have their own agenda/perspective to substantiate. (That doesn't mean that sites without high-quality content can't ever rank well, obviously).

Originally Posted by carolm

Link Swaps - Are They Black Hat?

I'm not sure I'd even dignify them with the label "black hat", to be honest. I suppose one might say "attempted black hat", arguably.

But mostly they're just silly, aren't they?

Thanks

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yukon Banned 11 years ago

If the link delivers targeted traffic I wouldn't care what anyone else thought about it (including Google).

I have a few quality reciprocal links that exchange targeted traffic, never had a problem ranking the pages those links are on.
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Gareth Mailer 11 years ago

On the question, I've mentioned this a lot in the last few posts but no form of link building is 'dead' or 'bad' per say - it depends on:

1. Whether you are going to get caught.
2. The level of risk you are willing to assume.

Some mechanisms are higher risk, some lower risk - do too much of one thing and you increase the probability that you be 'detected'. The long held view of reciprocal linking is that it's merely an 'exchange of votes'; in 2013, there are far better mechanisms which can be utilised.

Search for 'car insurance', check the top results and then report back to me on how good Google is at policing the web - the vast majority of big brands which have been 'detected' recently i.e. interflora, BMW, Google Chrome are manually reviewed i.e. it's not an algorithm at play.

If you are going to make your activity blunt and repetitive then of course you increase the risk, as is the case with ANY mechanism (ask anyone who was over-reliant on paid linking, exact match anchor text optimisation or public blog networks).
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carolm 11 years ago
Thanks for your replies. There seems to be maybe 3-4 different opinions here, and none of you say it's actually a good thing - have I got this right?

You think organized link swaps can be
- useless
- harmless
- something you could probably get away with
And I still don't know if I should link up with these people or not - obviously they are in a related niche, and a slightly higher Page Rank, but almost no content apart from their links.

Suppose I were to start doing this, is that likely to:
1. Increase my traffic?
2. Increase my Page Rank?
If not, then doing this would certainly be silly. Any views?
- Thanks
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squadron

11 years ago

Originally Posted by carolm

I've been getting a few people asking if I'd like to do a link swap with them. Their sites usually have a long list of 'Friendly Sites' (or similar wording) in their sidebar.

...

I think it's OK so long as there is some relevance and a bit of quality. What I've seen in practice is if you have a partners page and reach a tipping point in terms of quantity of outgoing links, you may lose a bit of PR on that page.

Here's what the Webmaster Guidelines have to say:

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CleanSEO Banned 11 years ago

Hi Carol,

I think you have to look carefully at what your giving and what you are getting back. You say the site has slightly better PR than yours but if they have a lot of outbound links (sounds like it) then that page's link juice is divvied up between all those links and you might end up with a pretty small share passing through your link.

Also... What about the link you will be expected to give them? Could be that you are getting the short end of the stick if you have fewer outbound links, even if your PR is lower you could be passing them more juice. That means that your link to them could possibly be more valuable than their link to you and if that's the case it wouldn't make much sense. HTH
- Thanks
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carolm 11 years ago

Thanks for all these great answers, people.

You have taught me a lot, and the webmaster tools link was exactly what I needed.

Note to self: I should rely more on what Google says, instead of what people say, Google said. Sadly, I don't always understand 'what Google said'.

I'm going to go with my initial gut instinct when I first visited this particular site: summed up as...what???? Followed by....why??? In other words I won't do the link exchange.

On a side issue, I was contacted by a plugin maker wanting to write a promo article to put on my site. After thinking about it and checking their site (impressive, and not short of a buck) I'm going to suggest that they might rather Sponsor an Ad for their products on my site at $? - price to be negotiated. And possibly a complimentary plugin as as well?

I think this is a brilliant idea....I wonder if it will work!
- Thanks
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JohnConorX 11 years ago

From by personal experience I fell 3 way back linking will work always no matter how many google algorithm changes to come in near future. ..
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Link Swaps - Are They Black Hat?

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