Why reciprocal links still matter

by Kevin Spence on April 16, 2010

Stephan Spencer wrote a dandy of a post over at SearchEngineLand entitled 36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To.

I wish he would have made a smaller list and stuck to the basics — anytime you set out to make a really long list, you’re going to start filling it will crap for the sake of making the list longer and more “authoritative.” That seems to be what happened here, as there are 5 or 6 points that serve only to spread more misinformation.

I’m going to tackle the points I believe are incorrect one at a time, over a series of posts, because they need to be corrected. First to the plate:

Reciprocal links

This is what Stephan has to say about reciprocal links:

Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount.

Well yeah…it’s easy for Google to see that Site 1 and Site 2 are both linking to each other. But so what? Automatically devaluing the links without looking for other signals would be like breaking up a couple making out on the bus because, for all you know, they *could* be brother and sister.

Let’s walk through a couple examples where it would make absolutely zero sense for Google to discount reciprocal links.

Example

If I have a site about baking, then it would be natural for me to link to other sites about baking. Conversely, it would be natural for other baking sites to link to me. We might even put each other on our blogrolls.

In many of the niches in which I operate, every authority links to every other authority. It’s natural to do so. This is how the internet works.

And guess what?

These reciprocal links are valuable

If you’re looking for the absolute best information on baking, who would you trust more to point you to valuable content: Other bakers, or your barber?

The bakers, of course.

But if we are to believe Stephan’s argument, the value of the most relevant links in a niche would be discounted since the sites sites are linking to each other in some fashion. The effect would be that a baker’s recommendations would be devalued relative to a barber’s (assuming the baker’s links are two-way and the barber’s is one-way).

This makes sense how?

And in any event:

Most reciprocal links aren’t intended to be reciprocal

Look, there are cases where reciprocal links are worthless. If my baking site has reciprocal links to a site about green army men, that isn’t going to help. The link probably won’t count that much, but not because they’re reciprocal. The link won’t have a lot of value because there’s a pretty big signal that these links are not natural.

Off-topic link trades are garbage.

And maybe that’s what Stephan meant to say.

But discounting reciprocal links as a rule is just insane. It’s completely natural process to link to related sites, and it’s completely natural to receive links from related sites as well.

Reciprocity is only a problem when there is intent to manipulate, and to measure intent, you have to look for signals that go beyond such a simple observation.

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Why big brands need SEO

by Kevin Spence on April 6, 2010

It’s true: A lot of big brands think that they don’t need SEO.

Now, before you go off giggling into the wilderness, it isn’t that big brands don’t know that SEO exists. In fact, they have what *seems* to be a valid logical reason for thinking they don’t need it. Their reasoning goes like this:

If we aren’t monetizing search traffic to our site through eCommerce or banner ads, then it doesn’t make any sense to pay someone to help bring traffic to the site. And in any event, everybody already knows our site exists — even if they’ve never been to it. They’ll find us if they’re looking for us.

It sounds solid on the surface, right? I mean, you can see how some people would be persuaded by such an argument. And in many cases, yes, everybody *does* know your site exists, even if they’ve never been to it (for instance, I’m absolutely certain that Wawa has a site, though I have never been there).

What’s wrong with their logic?

What these guys don’t understand is that SEO is not just about traffic numbers, and in some instances, it has almost nothing at all to do with traffic at all.

So what I’m going to do for the remainder of this post is take a look at one big brand’s web presence and explain how SEO would seriously help their marketing efforts.

Serial SEO Neglecter: McDonald’s

I’m going to use McDonald’s as an example here, because I don’t think there’s a more perfect brand in the world I could use to illustrate my point. This is why:

1. Everybody is familiar with the McDonald’s brand. You know they have a website, even if you’ve never been there.

2. Their website is about as optimized for SEO as a koala’s fart.

3.  ROI on SEO efforts would be difficult to measure, as McDonald’s isn’t directly monetizing their traffic in any way at all. And they shouldn’t, of course, as that isn’t the function of their site. But any decently good marketer knows that not everything worth doing has an easily measurable ROI.

Digging in

Let me show you a little screenshot of McDonald’s homepage so you can understand just how little search optimization they’re doing right now:

mcdonalds-homepage-images

Oooh boy, that’s a lot of flash. I don’t mind flash in general, and I believe there are some good uses for it, but here there’s nothing being done that couldnt’ be done with CSS and jquery.

Their page titles across the site are equally horrendous, and to Google, their homepage might as well look like this:

unicorns

More 100% flash pages are found throughout the site:

mcdonalds-success-story

Why McDonalds should care

I happen to like Chicken McNuggets, so I chose to Google ‘chicken mcnuggets’ to see how McDonalds is doing for that query.

They’re fourth…right behind Wikipedia, a site that wants to know what’s in a Chicken McNugget, and a story about a lawsuit directed at McDonald’s. These are obvious reputation management problems, but there is a bigger problem — one over which McDonalds has complete control.

The page on mcdonalds.com that is actually ranking for Chicken McNuggets is the absolute last page that McDonald’s wants you to see at this point. Yup, you guessed it — their nutritional info page. Goodbye millions of dollars spent on carefully crafted marketing messages trying to convince me that your food is getting healthier, because I just landed on your nutritional page and now I’m gone. Thanks for trying, though!

A letter to McDonald’s

You think that you don’t need Google, because you’re freaking McDonald’s and everybody already knows your name. You think people will find you on their own when they want to. And you’re 100% right.

But look, it’s not all about being found. It’s about showing people what you want them to see when you want them to see it. The bottom line is your lack of SEO is hurting the rest of your marketing campaign.

So do yourself a favor: Hire an SEO Expert. Take their advice on how to flesh out the content of your site. Teach them about the qualities of your product that you want people to associate with your brand, and the SEO will make sure that searchers are presented with the content that you want them to find for whatever you search for.

Just because you’re a big brand doesn’t mean you don’t need SEO.

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