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.

Many of us search engine optimization professionals will know what this phrase means, but for the rest it simply means getting links from other sites to your own.

Post Altavista if you can remember that far back, this was done by asking friends and foes to link to you, and initially search engines had no problem with this but Yahoo Google and MSN soon began to devalue these reciprocal efforts because too many of the reciprocal links were contrived and not natural.

Spam is known by some as ham, but in internet lingo its also known as the junk email that attempts to get commercial gain.

Examples of this, some marketers send out unsolicited comments using software robot programs – to create thousands of backlinks automatically in forums, blogs and other places. Some made hundreds of real but content-less webpages/sites with links back to their own – not the phrase “their own” – commercial products – thus creating a need for Google and other search engines to objectively create quality ranking scores to determine the relationship between linking sites. At that time, the search engines were not looking at some of these things such as which reciprocal links were owned by the same person or which chain of anchored links were on the same machine. In order to thwart spammers, this info is deemed to be rather important for determining exactly who the spammers are.

Perhaps one of the most important parts of the backlinking process is which keywords one uses – traditionally, this has been where most linking efforts have failed.

Why? We have no idea exactly how others will link to our online assets. This is oddly enough – at odds – with what most seo professionals will tell you about how you should control the text or anchor text in the documents that link back to you.

Also, since as a casual reader, you are not likely to be an expert on long tail 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 brand new online venture, even after being indexed by Google or most search engines, typically has no chance at ranking on its chosen keywords for many months if not years.

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

But there is yet another major problem. Initially a new html or htm page has a Google Rank of N/A. Then after its indexed, typically 0 where Zero 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, its zero which is evidence of lack of backlinks will definitely work against it.

Exceptions abound however and if the newly created page is sitting on a grandly popular web2.0 social network property like kijji or facebook, 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.

We suspect these exceptions work because, it is thought that new pages on foundation sites such as those with a PageTrust 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?

Google’s time worn advice, go back to fundamentals, content and get creative. They would recommend strongly that we even create “link-bait” that will cause others to want to link to you.And that’s inherently a great idea if you understand in the faintest what link-bait is. Its never a great idea to truly ignore what Google recommends, however I urge you to examine the issue more deeply. Do you really have 3-6 months that it takes to consistently create new articles on a daily basis, and to publish a huge amount of high grade material in one spot that would cause people to consistently put a link to that page from their own – If the answer is no then you understand why most of us will never ever intentionally create link-bait.

There has to be ways around this. What should one do?

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