ForumsInternet/eCommerce

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects,
commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice
and Bob have websites. If Bob's website links to Alice's website, and
Alice's website links to Bob's website, the websites are reciprocally
linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link
exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search
engines.
Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search
engine optimization process because
Google uses link popularity
algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular
page and the
anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.

LUCKIEST

You can link to your own sites - but the 'rules' for not getting penalized are a little more detailed than if you link to your own sites or not.
All the rules were formed over the years from spammers and scammers actually using them in such excess that it directed the way Internet evolved.
I'll show you some rules , and reasons why these rules began.

Things not to do in your linking.

1. Double content (do your sites have duplicate pages or text - this is bad)

Reason 1: decade or so ago ,webmasters would mass duplicate pages to get bulk pages with a rank. If they had one page that ranked well, and had a lot of keywords, they would mass duplicate it. (mass duplicate into the thousands, tens of thousands ,millions perhaps by programs)

Reason 2: the Affiliate website craze of 8 years ago - Every business that wanted to sell, sell sell.. would create their main flagship website, and then duplicates with varying color themes, and have Internet users sign up and operate one of those sites. Problem with that was - there was millions of them , spam from those peoples trying to make their commission or affiliate cash didn't care about the integrity - and yet the main companies could try to deny responsibility for them.

2. Irrelevant content linking ( does your site have anything related, or to do with the site youre linked to? is it T-shirt prints and auto parts? because search engines are cracking down on spam and obvious attempts to boost PR (page rank) of your site through mass linking)

Reason: Website owners and online businesses all want to get high 'SERPS' (in short, this refers to your search engine placement. or where your site appears for any search term or keyword on search engines like Google)
In order to get high SERPS you needed as the saying goes "lots of backlinks!" But, once that was realized, everyone was linking to everyone else.
It turned into a mass interlinking, irrelevant bulk tangled linking mess of crap. But , they were getting high SERPS ,perhaps over 8 years ago .

3. Paid Links (a new one ) Search engines never used to care when webmasters would buy links from higher PR (pagerank) websites . The webmaster would buy a link, and the other site with higher popularity would place a link to them on their more popular site. (so in short the webmaster was renting a link to get higher popularity from a more popular site)
Google has waged war on this suddenly..and aome webmasters are in a frenzy as their PR 6 websites drop to PR 1.

advertising links are advertising links. and search engines know they could be getting that money if you advertised with their services. Also, since your popularity gained from link buying is fake, they dont like it because it undermines the integrity of popularity the search engines are trying to create.

all advertising links now will mostly have a rel="nofollow" in the hyperlink tags.
Search engines like Google dont ask or need to investigate if you are using a paid link , if they suspect it, if your site has no relevance to the other, they can just sock it in thre eye. lol

does that help ya with some idea about linking?

ezprint,

What you say confirms my opinion of the whole SEO/linking business. It gets more and more complicated and convoluted every day because so many "bad apples" have tried to manipulate it. Few people can actually keep up with it. Google and the others change the rules to stay ahead of the scammers, but the scammers seem to be quicker at adapting to the changes than the honest people. For example, I now see SEO websites that offer to write articles with a link to your website, and post them on blogs. It supposedly gives the appearance of someone writing a real article and just, by the way, here's a good website to go to. How is Google going to react to that kind of trickery?

Intech, I think ezprint said it right about links. I will add one more thing to his comments.

It is very hard to rank high, particularly these days with an e-commerce. Some unethical SEO (web ring) people are now targetting legetimate websites as their own sites are rejected more and more by search engines algorithm. Their unfair techniques are using badware on your pages, or scrap, redirect your entire site for ranking gain (cybersquatting). Unfortunately another game start and can cost you a lot of money or you can take legal action and go after them with no guarantees.

The best protection you can have on your site is a trademark.

Cybersquatting is a crime, here some information:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c10
6:S.1255.IS
http://tcattorney.typepad.com/anticybersq
uatting_consum/anticybersquatting_consumer
_protection_act/index.html

You are right, redirect could affect your site/business. You can even rank lower than the scraper/highjacker. These issues need to be taking care seriously, because you can lost your ranking or in the worst case scenario loose your business, the search engines can considered, that you are not the original, etc...

No this is not a paranoid, you need to becareful when someone send you an email, even if there are no links.

There are many things behind the scene. Ecommerce are targeted by spamers, highjackers, hackers, copyrights infringement, trademark infringement, suspects bots and crawler, etc...We need to live with that and protect our business, particularely when a site rank high everywhere you are more an more targeted by those.

Back to the subject, I found a very nice tool to check the bad neighborhood at http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link
-tool.htm that give an idea about the site or pages with links.

I am using more and more the no follow tag, because you can link today to a good reputable site, then tomorrow this link could be harmful to your site. So I decided when I am linking to a site to use a no follow tag to avoid any problems.

rel="nofollow" is good for links that are advertisement links.
Since search engines like Google are penalizing fraud PR (pagerank) hyping, they may be using a relevance strategy to check for the relevance and placement of links.

If you want to link to a site from your website without it counting as a 'vote' from your site, you should use the rel="nofollow"
a working example <a href=http://wwvv.sample_site.com" rel="nofollow">

Search engines count all links to other websites as a vote from your site. To find the score of a websites page, they look to see how many other websites are 'voting' for it with a link. They then check the score and relevance of the pages/sites that are voting for your site.
Because of this, many websites with a high PR score were renting links to other websites. (i.e. = "if you pay their website an agreed amount of money per month, they will put a link on their website as a 'vote' for your site. )

But it became obvious to search engines that those link rentals were screwing up the validity and credibility of their rankings systems. The search engines dont want to become irrelevant and a thing of the past, so they must try to remain credible. as a result of the link rentals, search engines have started to try to crack down on all link rentals - and they're doing it by automation and manual reviews.

Google posted a warning to webmasters to alert them to add rel="nofollow" tags to all their paid links ..or to face the consequences.

Hopefully in the long run this will work out for legitimate websites - but the process of how accurate the search engines will be in cracking down on this ,is still pretty much being debated.

The easiest way to remember it , is to realize that any links on your site are counted as a 'vote' for another websites score.
If those sites are irrelevant to your site , you may consider including the rel="nofollow" as rel="nofollow" allows you to link to another site, but ..its telling the search engines= "hey , wait a minute..this is just a friend or a site that I like, so this is not a vote and do not include it into your voting score system. "

The search engines will not consider any rel="nofollows" as votes, and as a result it should take any responsibility or credibility issues off your site for linking to them. Otherwise, if the search engines have a problem with your site's vote.. they may reduce your sites credibility by saying = "this site A voted for site B ..but site B has no relevance, its spammy, and it emails people way too much. so if site B is 'bad' ..then site A must share responsibility for trying to vote for them and trying to give threm credibility.

I suspect that these new methods and 'rules' are trying to make site owners more aware of how and who they link to. It will cause site owners to investigate other websites as opposed to just throwing them a link.

Yes, but think about it a second, Google started this game, and want us to go for their own advertising system which is manipulated. I tried before Adwords, and it wasn't succesful for me, then recieved hits from their system after I closed my Adwords account which confirmed manipulation. Anyway I prefer to rank in organic search, instead of any advertising way except quality directories.