Make Money Online - Reciprocal Linking and SEO

A few month back you created a website in an effort to make money online. Today, you are thinking about an email request which has you in a dilemma. It is the one that you got last week about giving someone a reciprocal link. Although you do not know this person, there you are trying to make the best decision for your own website.

 

Many of us search engine optimization (SEO) fanatics keenly know what this term means, but for the rest of us it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

 

Before Google, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and this was acceptable for a while. However, Google and others search engines soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because Joe would call Paul, Claire, Roger and Mary to ask them to link to his site. Google particularly thought that this activity was simply contrived, and not natural.

 

Spam is known by some as ham, but in Internet lingo, it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the Internet with their own commercial resource. More specifically, too many enterprising spammers send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs - to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own - not the phrase "their own" - commercial products - thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. In those early days, the search engines were not looking at things, such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same group or which chain of anchored links were with the same ISP. In order to stop those who would fill our inboxes with junk, this data is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

Perhaps one of the most important parts of the backlinking process is which keywords one uses. Traditionally, this has been where many back-link efforts have failed. Why? Because we have no idea exactly how others will link to our online assets. Since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having t he most traffic. One could, however, be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very new online entity, even after being indexed quickly by Bing, or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking for its chosen keywords for many months if not years. Perhaps this is not all one has to worry about.

 

 

The potential problems do not stop there. The page rank of new articles is low after initial indexing. In fact, it is typically zero on a scale of zero to ten, where 0 is the weakest, and 10 is the best. Although some may argue that while a new page with zero rank can have a freshness quotient which can help it positively, in most search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of credibility will assuredly not work in its favor.

 

Exceptions to This Theory

If the newly created page is sitting on a very popular Web 2.0 social network property like  eBay, MySpace, Squidoo or Scribd, to name a few, then it will not be penalized as much. This is because its current PageRank or credibility level appears to be well above a zero.

 

As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they rest on.

 

What can a novice do in the face of such technical babble?

 

Google would say, go back to the fundamentals. Create good, unique content, and be innovative. They would recommend strongly that you even create "link-bait" that will cause others to want to link to you. Which I also recommend, if you have any idea what this link-bait thing means. It is never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however, I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Calculate whether you really have the 6-18 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own. If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait. If you have the time, this strategy will drive traffic which will enable you to consistently make money online.

 

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