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So, you are thinking about that email request. The one you got last week about giving someone a reciprocal link. You don’t know this person from adam, but there you are trying to make the best decision for your own website.

Most of us seo afficionados keenly know what this term means, but for the less geeky it simply means getting others to link to your site from their own.

Pre-google, this was done by exchanging links between sites, and initially whole communities even encouraged this but Google and others soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts due to not just the potential for spam but because actual REAL link spam that was taking place in this area.

Spam is known to many of us as that cheap meat in a can, but in internet lingo it is also known as the process whereby a few tech savvy individuals attempt to gain unfair advantage by flooding areas of the internet with their own commercial resource.

So for example, many unscrupulous spam masters send out unsolicited commercial spam email to millions of unsuspecting users. Others created fake websites and pages with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – hence the need for objective PageRank and PageTrust. At that time, the search engines were not looking at these items such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which 20 reciprocal links were sharing the same IP Address. In order to stop spammers, this info is collected and analyzed as it’s rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

It is said that successful backlinking depends very heavily on the keywords one chooses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have failed.

Why? Because unless you created the links yourself, you can’t determine how someone else will link to your site. And in direct contradiction to what you might be reading around the net, therein lies a big part of the problem, right?

Also, since as a casual reader, one is not likely to be an expert on niche market keywords, one is going to most logically try to pick the keywords having the most traffic. One could however be forgiven for this as it really is a most logical mistake. A very new site, even after being indexed by MSN or most search engines, doesn’t stand a prayer for getting traffic based on the most highly trafficked keywords – sorry but this wait for traffic could extend to many months or even years.

Ergo, have we looked at a potentially time wasting effort here?

But there is yet one more major issue. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where 0 is worst and 10 is the best. Some may say differently while a new page with N/A or O as its rank can have a freshness quotient that can help it positively, in many search engines, this zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely not work in its favor.

But there are exceptions to every rule and if the newly created page is sitting on a highly popular Web 2 social network property like squidoo or craigslist, bebo or scribd to name a few then it won’t be penalized as much just because its current pagerank or credibility level appears to be a zero.

As the examples of exceptions above clearly show, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a credibility level of 5 or above, inherently acquire some of the PageRank or PageTrust of the site that they are associated with.

Technical babble galore – the question really is – So, what’s a girl to do?

Many seo experts might say, go back to fundamentals, ensure that you are putting up great and get creative. They would recommend strongly that you even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you can get this very weighty idea to lift off the ground any at all. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issues involved in creating link-bait more deeply. Calculate whether you really have 8-9 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to put out such a ferocious amount of intensely likable content in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is yes, then you now know the true meaning of link-bait.

There has got to be a better way no?

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