I am here today to dispel the myth of reciprocal links

Posted on November 2, 2006 - Filed Under Link Building

Using City Challenge as an example…
Number of Links:
Google 36
Yahoo! 465
MSN Search 987
AltaVista 486
AlltheWeb 434

DMOZ.org Entry:
City Challenge
Business management game for team building, communications, and leadership skills. Complete event management is offered by Read Edge Events Ltd.
http://www.citychallengeuk.com/

Other Directories Listing:
City Challenge - Team Building Events
City Challenge UK, the Business Management Game: corporate development business management game to enhance team building, communications, co-operation, leadership and time-management skills for middle and senior management.
http://www.citychallengeuk.com

Does the site have a “links” page: Yes

What makes up that links page:

77 links in total.

10 links are hand picked and link to related sites.

8 links are to “highly regarded” sites, such as the BBC, Google etc.

41 links are requested reciprocal links.

So… how come this site, that only has 41 reciprocal links set up, is linked to by over 400 other sites???

The answer is DMOZ and other directory listings.

If you search for the complete DMOZ description for the site you get 2100 results on Google.

This suggests to me that DMOZ and other directories have fed into those 2100 other sites and generated the above result, as I can guarantee the site hasn’t been hand submitted to each of them!

What does this tell me? It tells me that getting listed on DMOZ and other highly regarded sites/directories will generate far more links than reciprocal linking ever will. It also generates links that are of far higher quality than reciprocal linking ever will, as most of the links are one-way inbound links.

These are just some thought I have put together in a spare hour. Comments are more than welcome, in fact I genuinely encourage you to post your thoughts and feedback.

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