Reciprocal Linking 101: 3 Facts Every Realtor Needs to Know

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By Israel Rothman

RISMEDIA, Feb. 23, 2008-In a follow-up to this week’s article, Reciprocal Linking – Realtor in Flower Mound, Texas Learns the Hard Way, there are several misunderstood facts about keeping in the know when it comes to search engines. Today, things have changed on the search engines regarding links “in,” links “out” and “reciprocal linking” in regard to Internet marketing and search engine placement. Here are the facts, every Realtor needs to know to become successful with their websites.

1. Links “In”

Links “in” are hyperlinks (links) which consist of words or images on other websites that are linked to your website address so that when someone clicks on them they are transferred to your website.

For the most part, all links to your website are good for your search engine placement (IE: your place on the page when people search for what you do, where you do it, etc.), and these links can also create traffic directly from people who visit the other websites who “click-through” by doing the above.

However, as search engines and their algorithms have evolved, spammers and spoilers have tried all sorts of ways of beating this system of popularity to promote websites that really aren’t what they are described as. Because this is not good for the search engine, or its shoppers, recent changes have added penalties and filters to catch people who are doing this for placement sake without being conscious as to relevant content.

It is far more valuable to have a few good links from valuable, trusted, content-specific sites that are relevant to the page linked to, rather than having thousands of random links from un-related sites. This is why some sites that ranked two years ago are now lost in oblivion.

2. Links “out”

In general, links “out” are bad. Links out are the reverse of the above; where you link to other sites. This practice also has been abused, so that now the search engines favor a few very useful relevant links rather than a whole bunch of useless ones.

With links out, quality is better than quantity, and one must be careful (especially with small sites) because extra pages and links out from the main pages diminish the ranking power of the page the links originate from. Many sites insert code: ( ‘rel=”no” ) into all out-bound links to avoid this diminishment of page ranking. It will only be a matter of time until this practice also is penalized, because its aim is to circumvent the search engines’ algorithms.

It is best to have very few links out, and to have them lead to very useful, relevant, on-topic pages.

3. Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is ugly. There have been so many link-farms, web rings, reciprocal linking campaigns, splogs and other methods utilized to achieve rankings this way, that it is now penalized.

Some rules of thumb to avoid penalties:

- Do not try to fool Google or the other search engines, they will catch you
- If it is good for the searchers, it is ok with Google; if it fools the searchers, it is bad and will be penalized
- If it is useful, real, relevant, and good for navigation in terms of the searcher finding exactly what he is looking for, it is good also for rankings.

Israel Rothman is an Internet advertising consultant who writes for several online magazines. Rothman has been a pioneer in Social Media Marketing as a method of intentional search engine placement for over 800 companies during the last 10 years. He is CEO and founder of SocialMediaSystems.com LLC.

For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com.

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