Matt Cutts on reciprocal links

Calculator · #**1 Matt Cutts on reciprocal links** 05-02-2007, 12:24 AM

Matt Cutts posted about reciprocal links on his blog today:

"Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking."
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

This seems to contradict the wisdom of this crowd. Why delete all your state pages? Is there any reason to believe real estate agents can't reciprocal link as long as it's not excessive? Where has Matt or anyone else from Google said so?

I'm trying to help some agents figure out how to proceed and there seems to be a mass hysteria here w/few facts to back it up. Please help me understand.

JennSellsFast · 05-02-2007, 06:36 PM

Thanks for posting that link. I just read it, and it seems that Cutts is trying to get the point that those links just aren't going to carry much weight in the future. As far as what happened with the AA hand jobs, I really believe it was strictly an "AA" thing. Remember, we used to link to 1000s of other AA sites on the same servers! OUCH! They told us to stop, some did, some didn't. We had to see this coming.

webmaster · 05-02-2007, 06:44 PM

I love this quote, I need to make it a sticky

Quote:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

Matt Cutts, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

SEO Nick · 05-02-2007, 07:14 PM

Good post! I kind of figured people were jumping the gun. This puts my mind at ease, though. That supplemental results bit is great! It will give me something to say to link partners who say it's "Worthless" being in Supplementals.

kyle422 · 05-02-2007, 08:12 PM

So should we put our directories back up?

I'm sure most of the people I emailed already deleted my links. Oh well.

ericbramlett · 05-02-2007, 08:14 PM

Great post! Thanks Nick. I've noticed everyone talking about "penalties" for having the reciprocal link state pages up. One thing I've learned from you guys (REW) is that we need to think more about what helps, and less about what penalizes. I don't think the state recip link pages are helping us a whole lot (if any,) but I don't think it's absolutely necessary to run & delete these pages or risk a huge penalty. Here's my favorite quote from the article:

Quote:

That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less. As I said in January: “The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

He states simply - if you're relying on excessive reciprocal links, you're going to be hurt, b/c those links will count for less - not b/c they're penalizing you for having them. A good reason to make sure you have a diverse linking portfolio.

Jay Griffin · 05-02-2007, 08:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SEO Nick

Good post! I kind of figured people were jumping the gun. This puts my mind at ease, though. That supplemental results bit is great! It will give me something to say to link partners who say it's "Worthless" being in Supplementals.

Why would anybody that is linking to your page because of its merits be concerned if it is in the supplemental index?

webmaster · 05-02-2007, 08:27 PM

Good point

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jay Griffin

Why would anybody that is linking to your page because of its merits be concerned if it is in the supplemental index?

Calculator · 05-02-2007, 09:11 PM

The flip side of is also true: if webmasters really cared about the sites they link to in their reciprocal directories those pages wouldn't be supplemental.

There are so few links going into reciprocal pages they go supplemental because they don't have enough PR. The single "resources" link at the bottom of the page doesn't send enough PR into the directory. It's a natural and elegant way for google to eliminate the influence of reciprocal links.

Now if there were links all over the site to "See Realtors in other states" in prominent places, the state pages wouldn't be supplemental in the first place.

osobluwtr · 05-03-2007, 12:11 AM

Any reason why we cant change the address to site.com/1 instead of site.com/alaska and limit the page to 3 links? Then throw in a three way instead of recips?

Would we solve the problem?

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