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Q: I recently asked a relevant website with a high Google PageRank value if they could link to a page on my website. They said they would gladly add a link if I could add one to their site somewhere on my website. Would this be damaging to my site? I have thought about setting up a links page with a noindex, nofollow tag so that Google will not pick up the link on our website. What should I do
A: Great question, but first a disclaimer: As you may know from reading our book, we really don’t keep too close an eye on the many ins and outs of Google’s algorithm. We are more likely to focus on what’s good for your site visitors than what’s good for your Google PageRank [Wikipedia]. Having said that, technically speaking reciprocal linking can put you at risk for diluting your PageRank.
We came across a recent quote from Matt Cutts’ blog (Matt is a “celebrity” Google engineer; he is Google’s unofficial ambassador to the SEO industry). Here, he talks about sites that he was reviewing as part of a panel for a conference:
“Several times during the session, it was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.”
See Matt’s full post here.
In our opinion, you’re talking about one link to a relevant site. You’re not setting up excessive reciprocal links, so we don’t think you’ll be penalized. Will you algorithmically “lose” a little RageRank value by linking back to the PR 6 site? Probably, but we think that you have more to gain than you have to lose by linking. There are so many sites out there that link back to each other due to true relevance, we’d be shocked if one or two reciprocal links could knock a site’s PR down significantly.
Regarding making a links page with a no index, no follow robots META tag, we don’t recommend it, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s not really in the spirit of what you’d be agreeing to do for the PR 6 site. They want a link that the search engines will see. And secondly, who knows, the PR 6 site will probably check your site and could drop your link due to the no index, no follow tag.
You say it’s a relevant site. In our opinion, relevance is the bottom line. Therefore, PageRank issues aside, if you think that the website would be helpful/useful/interesting to your visitors, we say go ahead and provide a link. If not, then don’t do it for the PageRank, because there are lots of other ways to drive targeted traffic to your site.
