Reciprocal Links - SEO in 2022

[larcha]

Recently, I have been trying a new strategy to acquire links - I make a social media post (in my niche) saying I'm looking for ideas (links from their blogs) to add to existing/new articles on my site. I have gotten plenty of responses and usually ask the person to respond to my DM where I share my article which now has their link.

After some casual banter back-and-forth discussing their website and the plans for mine, I highlight an article on their site that is very much related to one of mine saying "I think my article could be a great resource for your readers". Some respond yes right away, some say thank you and that they will review, others stop answering.

I have spoken with ~15 site owners, which also means I have externally linked to ~15 sites.

Successful do-follow links received back to me: 5
DA 12
DA 45
DA 51
DA 52
DA 55

I'm still waiting to hear back from a few people which could be additional opportunities for more links.


"Link to me and I'll link back to you". Is this strategy worth it since they are reciprocal links? Are reciprocal links passing juice where this makes sense?

Side note: I have never externally linked to any websites until I started this outreach (figured it may help my on-page SEO even leaving the links from people that ignored me).

 

[Ryuzaki]

If your page A links to their page B, and their page C links to your page D, then it's no big deal. There's nothing to detect there. Domains link to each other all the time, especially when they're bigger players. It's impossible to avoid.

Now, if you were doing like Page A <---> Page B where the two of you are linking to each other from the same pages (the page you link to links back to the page you linked from), that's obvious and I'd avoid that.

There is an obvious problem though. 100% of your outbound link profile links back to you. That's very unnatural.

 

[larcha]

If your page A links to their page B, and their page C links to your page D, then it's no big deal. There's nothing to detect there. Domains link to each other all the time, especially when they're bigger players. It's impossible to avoid.

Now, if you were doing like Page A <---> Page B where the two of you are linking to each other from the same pages (the page you link to links back to the page you linked from), that's obvious and I'd avoid that.

There is an obvious problem though. 100% of your outbound link profile links back to you. That's very unnatural.

That's what I figured - thanks. I had a DA of 32 entering this initiative so I have a decent & diverse backlink profile already.

It's funny how a few people said that they are afraid of linking back to me since Google may not like. The more friendly I am, the better the success. I guess I can always follow up with these people in the next couple of weeks to continue building the relationship.

 

[Chumbawamba]

• Do that outreach
• Filter for the sites you want links from
• Find a site that will accept "niche edits"
• Find a post/page on there that suits your target site
• Tell them its "your site" and that you'd add a link there
• Ask them to link to your "other" site (your real one)

Bit more outlay, but you're not creating reciprocal links while getting the links you want.

 

[AhFreshMeat]

A question/thought to add to this because I do a lot of three way link exchanges.

There are three websites in this scenario:

• Website A: my authority site
• Website B: my secondary site I made, mostly for partnerships.
• Website C: a random, credible domain that agrees to a three way link exchange

My secondary website (B), links to a credible site that I outreach to. This site has agreed to link back to my authority site.

- 75% of my outgoing links from my secondary site (website B) link to different websites that all link back to my authority site (website A)
- the links are published at around the same time.

does google care, penalize or deem the links null in this case? Cant they tell all the outgoing links somehow link back to authority site? If so, do they even care?

 

[Ryuzaki]

There’s a lot of data crunching to do to find people gaming tiers. Would it actually clean up the SERPs if they did it? Probably not enough to warrant the expense and time. And it’s not something that’s public facing (the tiers, that is) so there’s no embarrassment or public pressure to change it. People who go the extra mile with their linking probably do the same with their site design and content too, so I’m guessing there’s less to gain for them to chase this down.

 

[Hanuman]

What I do for clients - I write long-form guest posts (those that are 2000+ words long). Seek link like you do to include - often add 8-9 links in an article, and then seek a favor and get these sites to link to my clients from their blogs. This a 3-way link exchange that works well for large websites (top authority client sites, and I get links from such large websites). But may still be a problem for a smaller site like yours, getting links from similar smaller sites, since it's easy to see how the linking scheme works here. Not that Google may have a script checking for something like this, but it should be possible for them to figure it out. And is still risky.

 

[nicemkay]

I've recently started replying to people asking for guest posts. I have some concerns about:

1. How long after I link to them should they link to me? Wouldn't Google have some way of noticing we started linking to each other at about the same time? Wouldn't that be cause for concern?
2. How old can the article be, from which I request a link in the form of a link insertion? For example, someone contacted me for a guest post, I was looking through their stuff to request a link insertion and found a 3 year old article on their website. And the article isn't very up to date, I'd say. In my mind it's not the best idea to link from it, but figured I'd ask this here in case someone has other ideas.

 

[Ryuzaki]

How long after I link to them should they link to me? Wouldn't Google have some way of noticing we started linking to each other at about the same time? Wouldn't that be cause for concern?

Don't link to the same pages from each other, as in your Page A links to their Page B, and their Page B links back to your Page A. Then you don't need to worry. Have your Page A link to their Page B, and their Page C link to your Page A.

Sure, Google could spend a ton of time and resources on crunching data for when they first crawl links and try match the time to catch reciprocal linkers. But they have better ways of handling it indirectly. It's not that they care who links to each other. They just don't want to rank spammers with trash content. They're learning how to not rank trash content better and better.

How old can the article be, from which I request a link in the form of a link insertion?

Just make sure it's indexed and then you need to get it recrawled (or wait for what can be up to 6 months or a lil more for it to happen naturally). The age doesn't matter. It counts all the same. It's a new, fresh link.