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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