The Two Sides of Reciprocal LinksReciprocal links are links with other sites. There is nothing very complicated here : you link to another site, and that site's webmaster returns the favor and links back to your site. These reciprocal links are very important for two major reasons. 1. You earn traffic. A part of people surfing the other site will click the link to your site and will visit you. 2. You earn qualified traffic. If you take care to set up reciprocal links with sites closely related to the topic of your site, then the visitors that come from related websites are highly targeted. They are interested in your site's theme and you have a much better chance of selling them your product. The number is the side number one of reciprocal links. As you can see, the more links you have, the more traffic you get The total number of web pages that point links to a related web site is called "Link Popularity". This concept is very important for search engines as they consider that site A is more important than site B if the link popularity of site A is higher than the link popularity of site B. So the better your popularity, the better your ranking. Your search engine position is directly affected by the link popularity. That is how search engines would rank you for a specific keyword, or specialized theme. Let's see the Goggle's page rank formula PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) For math wizards: PR(x) is the PageRank of x, C(x) is the number of outbound links on a page x, d is a damping factor set between 0 and 1 controlled by Goggle. As you can see the PageRank is almost completely dependent on the total number of links to other sites on that page. That changes completely the meaning of reciprocal links from the point of view of search engine optimization. A link to your site will have the highest amount of impact on your PageRank if : A. The page linking to your site page has a high PageRank. B. The total number of links on that page is low (just the one link to your site is the best). A site with a high PageRank but with a large number of outbound links can nullify the impact on your PageRank. A high PageRank also means traffic, and it is highly targeted too because your visitors find your site as a consequence of a query. As this query is close related to their interest you should expect that your site will be very attractive to them. But here the more links you have, the more traffic you get is not a fundamental truth. According to the above formula, for a reciprocal link its quality is very important. By quality I mean that the link comes to your site from pages with a high PageRank and a low number of total links. This is the second side of reciprocal links And the conclusion is simple : To receive the highest possible targeted traffic you need a large number of quality reciprocal links.
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