Reciprocal link building is one of the oldest tricks in the bag.
You link to me, and I'll link to you.
But this is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
In fact, they list "excessive link exchanges" as an example of a link scheme.
So the question is, how many websites have reciprocal links, and more importantly...
are they hurting their organic rankings?
Well, we studied 140,000 websites and came up with some very interesting results.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
In our study on reciprocal links we wanted to learn two things:
#1. How common are reciprocal links;
and #2, do they negatively affect your SEO?
So let's first dig into the data, and then touch on how you can apply this in an actionable
way for your search engine optimization efforts.
First, we wanted to find how many websites actually have reciprocal links.
So we took a sample of 140,000 websites that get at least 10,000 search visits per month from Google.
We then looked at the domains they were linking to
and the number of domains linking back to them.
And it's important to note that we were only looking at "dofollow" links here.
Finally, we plotted the results on a graph to visualize how common reciprocal links are.
And here are the results.
26.4% of our sample domains had no reciprocal links,
meaning that the vast majority, 73.6% to be exact,
had outgoing links to at least one domain where that website was linking back to them.
Quick sidenote: since Ahrefs blog doesn't participate in any kind of link exchanges,
we wanted to see what the overlap was like for the domains we've linked to.
And we found that we had 19.25% reciprocal links that just happened naturally.
So now this comes down to a "chicken or the egg" situation.
Are these websites linking back to each other because they're friends,
in a small niche without many resources or are they just blatant link exchanges?
Unfortunately, we'll never know.
Now, the second part of our study was to check if the top ranking pages for different queries
had reciprocal links.
So we selected 10,000 random non-branded queries with a keyword difficulty score between 40-60
to ensure the majority of top pages actually had links.
Then we looked for reciprocal links between the websites ranking in the top 10
and the websites linking to those in the search results.
And this is the pie-chart we came up with.
43.7% of top ranking pages had some kind of reciprocal link.
So that means on average, 4 to 5 of the top 10 organic results in Google
have some sort of reciprocal link.
This makes me conclude that reciprocal links are just a natural byproduct of the web.
So the question now is should you be doing link exchanges?
The answer is yes and no.
The "no" is pretty straightforward.
It's against Google's Webmaster Guidelines and it's just annoying getting emails from
people begging for links.
Now, the reason why I say "yes" is because you don't need to avoid linking to sites that
have previously linked to you.
If their page is the best fit as a reference,
then I think it's safe to say that you can link to them freely.
So what can you learn from this and more importantly, how can you apply this data to your SEO strategy?
The key is to build relationships through outreach.
Asking someone for a favor without value or giving first usually won't work.
This goes against the rule of reciprocity, which tells us that people naturally want
to respond to a positive action with another positive action.
Not something that's conditional or charity without a cause.
So in my opinion, this automatically excludes emails that I'm sure you've gotten before
or maybe even sent.
Here are a couple of examples of bad ways to try and "build a relationship."
"We mentioned you, so can you link to us?"
"You linked to them, so you should link to me?"
If you still don't get it, let me drill this in with a super- real example that I'm sure you've experienced.
Think back to as early as grade school.
I'm sure you had that person in your class that would never bring a pencil, pen, or paper to class.
So they asked you for one.
And being the nice person you are, you probably lent it to them.
But as they kept asking, day after day, week after week, you probably got annoyed.
They asked for something, never offered anything of value in return,
and sometimes, I'm sure you never even got your pen back.
These are the majority of outreach emails I get in my inbox.
Now in adulthood, the same holds true.
Someone refers a new business client to you, so you give them a kickback
or you send them any referrals that you can't serve.
And there's no written agreement here, you just do it for each other.
Again, we're all people and we all want to return kind actions to one another.
You just have to take matters into your own hands
because you can't wait and expect people to come to you.
Now, as an SEO, you probably want some kind of data-driven way to do this for links.
Well, I've got one for you.
The first thing you should do is look for people that you link to a lot.
Now, if you're perpetually linking to someone, it's pretty clear that you genuinely enjoy their content.
Meaning, you'd probably want to get to know them.
To find these websites, go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer and enter in your own domain.
Let's pretend that I'm with smartblogger.com.
Next, go to the Linked domains report, which will show you all of the unique websites you're linking to
and the number of times you've linked to them.
From here, it's just a matter of skimming through the list for familiar domain names,
where you haven't spoken to the website owners, you've linked to them at least a few times,
and you want to network with them.
So a couple that pop out to me are CopyBlogger, ProBlogger, and SmartPassiveIncome
who are all relevant and not direct competitors.
Next, go to the Referring domains report, which will show you all of the unique websites
that are linking to you.
Now, just enter those domains into the search box one by one,
and you'll see if they've linked to you before and the number of times they've linked.
Assuming, we don't know any of these websites, the common ground we have is that we both
appreciate each other's content.
So it would definitely be worth reaching out with an intro and you can be quite confident
that they'll know who you are since a silent relationship has already been built by this point.
The next thing you should do is email these people.
Again, you don't want to send spammy emails asking them to link to you.
Instead, you want to give a lot of value
since you know these people like you and respect your work.
So as an example, let's say that you're about to launch a guest posting campaign for your own site.
You might say something like:
Hey Bobby,
Sam here with SmartBlogger.
This email is way overdue considering I'm super familiar with your blog.
Think I've linked to your posts like 50 times.
I'm in the middle of writing a guest post for [site name]
and was planning to link to your post on [topic].
My team and I plan to do guest posts on about a dozen or so other sites this month
so I was wondering if you have any other posts that would be good resources on blogging
for business and online marketing strategies.
Feel free to send me a list of pages that would work
and I'd be happy to link to you where it makes sense.
Cheers, Sam
Now, it's important to note that when you're sending these kinds of emails,
you shouldn't go in with the mentality of getting something in return.
Even if the person you're contacting may not be guest posting right now,
but the feelings are mutual in terms of respect for each other's work,
you can bet that they'll want to return the favor in whatever capacity they can.
The key thing with any kind of outreach email is to detemplatize your template
and sound like a human being talking to another human being.
You might look at this as a "link building strategy,"
but it's literally just a way of building relationships.
And based on our data, it is my firm belief that things like reciprocal links happen
because of relationships.
So rather than trying to game someone with a hack, go and build meaningful relationships
with people in your industry and help each other out.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe,
and let me know in the comments if you're doing reciprocal link building
and getting rankings as a result.
So keep grinding away, build some solid relationships with people in your industry,
and I'll see you in the next tutorial.