All the SEO experts and articles devoted to SEO inform us that Google is only interested in backlinks. Reciprocal links are not counted and have absolutely no importance although conversely you do not suffer any penalty for having them. They are simply of no benefit and conseuently not worth spending anytime over. The importance of any particular backlink is determined by the page rank of the linking page and the relevance of its content to the content of the linked site. They should to achieve maximum benefit be similar in content or at least have what can be considered to be relevant and related content. The higher the page rank of the linking site the better. So we are constantly berated to seek out these high ranking sites to get them to provide a backlink to our own sites. Often they also intimate how you can go about this but when reading on you are never given a definitive plan of for example how to convince a site with a page rank of 8 to link to your own site.



I cannot give any ideas as to how to achieve this either. Even if you were fortunate or lucky enough to get a backlink from a site with a PR of 8 would the link be considered relevant? Only it seems if the content of the overall site was related to the content of your own site? Google we re told looks carefully at the content across all the pages of a site and not just the content on the page where any link might be found. So I personally have stopped trying to achieve such links.

Personally I manage a site which has achieved a PR of 4. As a result I constantly receive emails from other website owners and developers asking for a reciprocal link. These webmasters always use the same line of argument ..'you will appreciate the importance of links to search engine positioning'?.. . Where have these people been the last two years? I always reply to them positively by refusing the reciprocal link but suggest that I will place a link to them if they can give me a good reasoned argument as to why I should. To date I have had not a single reply. These website developers would have better fortune if they asked directly for a backlink without mention of a useless reciprocal link. I am quite happy to accommodate someone who asks nicely with a reasoned argument. So webmasters out there take note.

Returning to the idea of relevant backlinks. The majority of my own backlinks are achieved by writing articles which provide quite reasonable page rank and absolute relevance because I am writing about the content of my website. The only downside to article writing and having the articles widely distributed is the penalty of duplicate content. Google will only take one of the sources and count it as a relevant backlink whilst the majority of the other search engines will often count all the places where the article has been published. Despite this article writing is still the best and easiest way of getting good backlinks. It might however take anything up to six months before Google will recognise this as a backlink.