![]() ![]() Then, as a result of getting organic traffic and exposure, they went on to pick up more links from other websites. It may well be the case that these pages got to the top of Google thanks to some early reciprocal links from friends. However, note that studying the top-ranking pages says nothing about cause and effect ( correlation ≠ causation). Important: Once again, we only looked at “dofollow” links. Looked for overlap between the sites linking to those pages (referring domains) and the sites to which the residing website links out.Pulled top 10 ranking pages in Google for each of them.Took a sample of ~10k non-branded search queries (with Keyword Difficulty scores between 40 and 60).If you ever perform such an experiment, let us know.įor now, we decided to work with the data we already have and study the commonality of reciprocal links among the top 10 ranking pages in Google. Build reciprocal links to some of those pages.Create a bunch of web pages with similar backlink profiles.The best way to prove that is with an experiment: For that reason, it would make sense for Google to value links from friends’ websites less than those from others, right? It’s easier to convince friends-to whom you may have already linked in the past-to link to you as opposed to complete strangers. The previous study confirmed our assumption that having a certain percentage of reciprocal links is perfectly natural and won’t necessarily lead to Google penalizing your website. How common are reciprocal links in Google’s top 10 search results? It’s possible for some sites with relatively high amounts of reciprocal links to perform reasonably well in Google. So right now, the only thing we can say with certainty is this: In plain English, this means that because we only studied domains with search traffic, any penalized websites were likely excluded from the start. That’s because it suffers from suvivorship bias. The same applies when asking for links from sites to which you already link.īut here’s the thing: This study doesn’t actually prove that reciprocal linking is 100% safe to do. It would seem then that reciprocal links are a common byproduct of the web, so you probably shouldn’t be afraid to link to sites already linking to you. Our thinking was simple: By studying how common reciprocal links are among websites getting consistent traffic from Google, we could get some clue as to the toxicity (or not) of such links. Plotted the results on a graph to visualize how common reciprocal links are.Checked for overlap between the sites to which they link and the sites that link to them.Took 140k websites with 10k+ visits/month from Google (estimated by Ahrefs).Hardly surprising, as doing so would be quite a labor and resource intensive process.įurther, here at Ahrefs, we don’t run such experiments-we only study data we already have at our disposal. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone carry out an experiment of this nature before. Leave a few of them intact as your control group. Build a particular number of reciprocal links to some of those websites.Wait until they start ranking in Google for some keywords. ![]()
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