I read an interesting discussion on the Lay My Hat forum about the pros and cons of reciprocal linking today, and thought it might be useful to share some thoughts on the matter here.
There are two reasons why directories want you to link back to them. The first and by far the biggest, is for SEO purposes. The more quality inbound links they have, the better their page rank with Google et al. The second is for traffic, but they’re unlikely to see much in the way of traffic from most small rental owners websites so it’s a secondary, and fairly minor concern for them.
From the rental property website owners perspective it’s the same. A reciprocal link will benefit you in terms of SEO ranking, and in terms of traffic driven to your website.
HOWEVER.. it’s worth checking whether the link to your website has the rel=”nofollow” attribute, as this is a tactic used by many websites to stop ‘Page Rank Leakage’ and if the link has this attribute, it will be OF NO USE from an SEO perspective.
The idea behind PRL is that if you have lots of outbound links out of your directory, you will assign some of your page rank to the linked websites, and that as a result some of your own page rank will ‘leak away’. That’s the theory and so you can imagine that directories with LOTS of listings and links to external websites will be concerned about this.
In 2005 Google, in a reaction to blog comment spam, announced that they would honour the rel=”nofollow” attibute in links, and not assign any credit to links with that attribute. 3 years on, the announcement has not stopped comment spam but it has been used by directory owners to stop PRL.
So how do you check to see if the link has the attibute?
In Firefox, simply hover over the link, right click and select ‘Properties’. If you see: Relation: nofollow, then the link is of no use in terms of SEO.
A quick look at Owners Direct shows they don’t use the attribute (good!) and VRBO use a dodgy framing method which ensures that there is no actual link to your website at all.
It’s unlikely a directory is going to change its’ linking method just because you’ve spotted they’re using the nofollow tactic, and equally, you might decide to swap links just for the traffic you’re likely to get from a link to your site. However, it’s worth considering the nofollow trick when you’re thinking about your planning your website SEO. Don’t assume that just because you’ve got a link it’s going to help your page rank.
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