Reciprocal Linking, Yay or Nay?
Within the past few years, the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN have been putting more emphasis on the number of Inbound Links (IBL's) your dentistry website receives. Every time, a well-known and indexed website places a link pointing to your dental site, in effect it gives your site a vote of confidence. The more IBL's your dental website receives, the more popular it will become and consequently it will be positioned higher on the search engines.
The Old Methods of Link Building
When SEO specialists realized this trend of change in SE behavior, like always, they looked for the easiest way to build their dentist clients thousands of IBL's within a short period of time.
1- Link Farms
Link farms were the easiest way to get links from. They simply would pay a minimal fee (maybe $10) and the owner of the link farm would place their clients' links on the farm site. Within a couple of months, the link farm website would become a jungle of links all irrelevant to one-another and to the link farm itself. Search engines were quick to discover the link farms since all there was on them were links and nothing else. Since the search engines dislike “spams” they decided to no give any value to links from link farms. In some cases, they even negatively affected some websites which were receiving IBL's from some link farms.
2- Directories
Directories have existed almost as long as the Internet itself. Some of the first directories that came to be were Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo Directory. When you place your dental website within the right category of these directories, they will place a link back to your dentistry website. IBL's from directories have always been a plus in the eyes of the search engines.
Besides Yahoo and DMOZ there are hundreds or thousands of other directories on the web that you can place your dental website within them. Most of the time, it is free to do so, but it takes a lot of time and energy to find the right directory and the right category for your dental website. At the end of the day, since these directories have links on them and nothing else, search engines give very little to no value to the links coming from these sites (Yahoo and DMOZ are exceptions). However, it does not hurt to place your website's links within these directories.
3- Reciprocal Linking
The next easy way to get many IBL's within a short span of time was engaging in reciprocal linking. “I scratch your back if you search mine” ideology found a place on the SEO world. Webmasters and SEO specialists found easy ways to email market thousands of people at a time with the request to swap links. A few years ago, when webmasters started doing so, it worked. But like always search engines caught up with SEO's and decided that reciprocal linking should have very little to no value and in some cases negative effect on a website's position on their data base. In October 2005, Google dropped the value of almost all the reciprocal links between dentistry websites.
One Way Links
Now we are back at square one. Search engines are still looking for votes of confidence (IBL's) from other related websites, but this time, not from link farms, directories or reciprocal linking, but from one-way links from legit and highly popular websites. Which means if website A is linking to you, you or one of your affiliates is not linking back to website A. There are different ways of getting your website one-way links that would not hurt, but help its position on the search engines. In the next article we will tell you about some of these methods.
Contact Us for More Information
If you’re looking for a professional dental Internet marketing firm, you’ve come to the right place. Give us a call at 1-877-932-6559 or email us for a free consultation to see how we can get you more patients.
