Back in the old days, you didn’t do reciprocal linking because you didn’t realize that there was a benefit from this in the search engine rankings. Back in the old days, you linked to websites that you liked and thought your visitors would benefit from. Other Webmasters linked to your site for the same reason. Back in the old days, you could simply optimize your website’s body text, title and meta tags and do well in the search engines.
Well, this isn’t the old days anymore.
Today, reciprocal linking, one-way linking, triangular linking, buying text links all has developed into a complex formula for linking strategy and most SEO’s, Webmasters and Internet Marketers spend an inordinate amount of time developing this strategy and doing the grunt work of acquiring relevant links. Plus, the most important part of this linking strategy is to gather all of these links in a way that will appear “natural” to the search engines.
Back in the old days, links were acquired naturally. Today the appearance of being natural is most important. Like so many things in this society, appearance is everything and fact is secondary. In order to succeed you have to play the game and keep up appearances as you do so.
Now there are a few excellent, dynamic websites with great public appeal that don’t have to have linking strategies as Webmasters will naturally want to link out to these authority sites. But, for the other 95-percent of the websites, there is a need to appear to be a player in their particular industry and linking strategies will continue to be an integral part of their Internet marketing efforts.
Search engine algorithms have a hard time differentiating fact from fiction, which is why marketers play this game in the first place. As long as the search engines cannot distinguish the authority sites from the wannabe authority sites, linking fever will continue.
Like it or not, appearances rule. Hollywood has known this for years. So, Hollywood Linking will continue as long as it is beneficial to Internet Marketers.
