Investigating Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is the Web’s equivalent of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The way it works is this: You put in a link on your page to another Web site, and the other Web site returns the favor by putting in a link to yours. Even directly competing sites can benefit from linking to one another, just as two restaurants can happily exist side by side.

Finding sites to link to

So whom do you want to link with? Well, the simple answer is “anybody and everybody.” The smart answer, though, is “the best and most popular sites in my category.” What’s best is a matter of opinion, but it’s pretty easy to find the most popular ones, and you can use this technique to piggyback on their success.

What you need to do is to spend some time working the search engines. Here’s the drill:

It may be helpful to put in a link to the other site first. That way, you can say something like, “I’ve linked to your site and would appreciate a return link from yours.” This takes the discussion out of the realm of the hypothetical and puts the other site’s Webmaster under an obligation to respond in kind. There are no guarantees, but most people do reciprocate.

Sometimes, you can’t find any contact info on a Web site, no matter how hard you look. If that’s the case and you really want to set up a reciprocal link with that site, you can run a search on the site’s domain name by using a WhoIs service. WhoIs identifies the administrative, billing, and technical contacts for a domain. The best known one is at Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp). Or you can run a search from your own system with software such as WhoIs ULTRA from AnalogX (www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/whois.htm).

Another worthwhile program you may want to check out is Link Trader. You use Link Trader to create a database of all the people you’ve set up reciprocal links with, and it checks those sites to verify that the link back to you still exists. Keep the database up-to-date and run the program on a regular basis, and you can quickly spot any sites that drop your link. Then you can e-mail the Webmasters and ask them to put the link back in. You can download Link Trader Pro at www.homebizfactory.com/Link_Trader_Pro.html.

Many search engines (Google, for example) consider the number of other sites with links to yours when determining how high you rank. This means that of two sites, with everything else being equal, the one with more links leading to it from other sites shows up before the other one in search results. Reciprocal linking is a powerful tool that you can use to legitimately boost your own site’s ratings.

Joining Web rings

Web rings are a kind of super reciprocal link arrangement. Instead of making a reciprocal link between two sites, you make it with an entire group of similar sites at a time. You can find Web rings on just about any topic you can think of, and many such rings are listed at http://dir.webring.com/rw or www.ringsurf.com. (See Figure 17-8.) You can also start your own Web ring if you want.

Figure 17-8. RingSurf is a good source for Web rings.

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The weakness of Web rings is that they link in a ring. In other words, each one links to the previous one in the list and the next one in the list. If any site drops out of the ring, that messes up the whole thing, just as if you broke a link in a chain.

Joining a banner exchange

In a banner exchange, each member creates a banner ad and submits it to a central site. That site, the exchange itself, automates the process of displaying all the members’ ads on all the other members’ Web sites. A banner exchange sounds like a great idea, but in practice, few banner exchanges survive for very long. If you’re considering joining one, make sure that you ask how long it’s been in operation. Also make it a point to contact current members and see how satisfied they are with the exchange.

That said, joining a banner exchange is an easy task. You fill out a simple application form on the exchange’s Web site; then you send the exchange your banner and place some HTML code on your site. That’s all there is to it — the exchange handles everything else. Several reputable banner exchanges are listed in Table 17-3.