I often receive emails from other small business owners telling me that I have a fantastic web site and that as a result they have added a link to my web site on their ‘Partners’ page. If I go to their web site, find the ‘Partners’ page and then trawl through the many sub-pages I should find my link in amongst all the ‘Tree-loppers’, ‘Plumbers’ and every other industry ‘partners’ they have established a reciprocal link with.
How very flattering.
They then ask that I include on my web site a link back to their web site.
They tell me that supporting each other by building backlinks like this will strengthen our respective web sites in the eyes of Google and the other search engines.
This is community building, right?
Wrong.
There is no community here, just a misguided belief that adding as many links as possible (and therefore generating many backlinks) is the right way to show the search engines that you are an authority in your industry. The desired result being, of course, that your web site appears on the first page of the search engines results page.
Well this is not the case.
Think about it.
Consider how you use the internet to either search for information or buy products.
Do you find a web site all about your favourite plant and go to their ‘Partners’ page, trawl through the tens or hundreds of ‘partner’ links to find a web site where you can buy your next television? No, of course you don’t because why would you trust a web site all about plants to show you where to buy a TV?
So what makes you think the search engines will see all these irrelevant ‘Partner’ backlinks as evidence that your web site is an authority in your industry?
They don’t, for the same reasons that you don’t.
All those reciprocal links that you spent many hours developing with irrelevant web sites are worthless. The search engines are designed to think like humans and because humans don’t generally read and act upon all those partner links neither do the search engines.
So stop wasting your time trying to set up reciprocal links with ‘Partners’ that you never do business with and are unrelated to your industry…and spend more time developing unique content and enduring relationships with your customers and business partners that you do work with.
These are the gold plated high value backlinks.
Once Google sees this happening then your web site will start to gain the authority that you are looking for.
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