Interesting question came up today where Janice from Australia Park Motel in Albury NSWasked how to add a link to her home page for a local Albury Wodonga website.
Adding links is pretty easy. The main question is Why? The website requested it, or required it, because they want to develop their inbound links. Of course, the same is true for Australia Park Motel. Inbound links are very important to every websites success with search engine ranking.
But, these are reciprocal links (I link to you and you link to me). Having reciprocal links is not bad, but Google no longer gives them much value. The real sticky point for me is when a website is a paid listing and then they also ask for a reciprocated link. I don’t think you should give it IMHO.
Also, assuming Google valued this style of reciprocated link highly, would there be any consequence to adding a link? I would always be wary of links to a website that generally advertises the area – including competitive businesses? In some cases they are really valuable references for our customers.
Links are good. We need to help our visitors find good information. A good website always links to good information because that is part of giving service.
We also did a website for Commodore Motor Inn in Albury. Should we link this motel in Alburyto Australia Park’s website? Here you are going to say, these guys are direct competitors – the answer is no. Maybe. But they are also members of Golden Chain Motels. Perhaps as a group they like to work together and help each other? Then, links make good sense.
So, if the links make sense because you just want to have them and you think they add value – then do it. Reciprocated Links won’t hurt your website. Well, that’s not totally true. Links to ’bad websites’ may hurt you because Google would see links to porn or other negative websites in a bad light. But Hey, that’s pretty obvious anyway.
I am also interested to do some link exchange with other accommodation websites. Guess this can help us to be better positioned on Google. It`s pity that Google no longer gives them much value. But, we still can try to do something
Hi Noak,
I think there should be a good way to manage link exchange, but as you say Google seems to devalue reciprocated links a lot.
We build a lot of accommodation websites and while there could be a great way to link them without using reciprocal links, they are all hosted on the same IP Address and I worry that they could be considered a link farm.
I’m really not sure what to do.