If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I came across a company that had an auto responder on Twitter saying “for link swap email me at xxx@yyyyy.com subject=TwitterLinkSwap for instructions please”. At first, I was like ‘oh boy’ (face-in-palm) but being the good guy that I am, I notified her of Google’s guidelines. She was literally shocked.

She had no idea that Google would penalize her for excessive reciprocal linking. Which is what she was doing, by having an auto-responder on Twitter to all new followers saying that (she has ~1,300 followers now). I checked out her site and she had over a few hundred links she was sending out.

Webmasters doing business online don’t always use reciprocal linking with Google in mind because reciprocal linking is part of the world wide web. Links bring traffic, follow or nofollow. Some more than others but traffic is traffic no matter how you cut it. If you have a link on someone’s website and your getting one to two visitors a day from them and the visitors are staying on your site for 3+ minutes, those are quality links, with or without Google in mind.

So, if your going to ask a webmaster via Facebook, Twitter, AIM, or whatever for a link, don’t over do it. Try to be relevant and if your worried about Google, penalizing you, then just simply ask the webmaster to put rel=”nofollow” on the link and you’ll be 100% safe. Happy reciprocal linking! :D