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 | Beware
the Reciprocal Link Short Sellers by Dirk Johnson There's a niche in stock market investing called "short selling". In a nutshell, they "borrow" stock today, sell it for the cash, and hope to sell it back later for a lower price, pocketing the difference. If the stock goes up and stays up, they eventually need to buy it back at a higher price, coming out of pocket. It's a lively and dicey game. There are market analysts who advise their clients as to which stocks to short. Since the risk in short selling far exceeds that of straightforward investing, these advisors have a desperate need to be "right". If they are wrong, their disciples become quite disgruntled with having to cover their short positions. There is strong drive on the part of short sellers to "talk down" a stock, using a variety of public relations gambits. Facts get twisted. The truth suffers. Anything that will reduce the public perception of the value of the stock is fair game. It can get ugly. It recently occurred to me that, within the SEO realm, there are a number of high-profile "reciprocal link short sellers". Many of the most vocal have been doing it for several years, using their "expert" status and industry influence to disparage the practice of reciprocal linking, calling it ineffective, immoral, and worse. If you want to see them, simply put "reciprocal
linking dead" into a search box and see what pops up. But here's just one
article from an SEO practitioner. It is a bit dated (March 2004), but that helps
to make my point that this kind talk has been going on for a long time... The common thread here is that none of these articles present any definitive proof whatsoever. Most are based on opinion and what is typically called "common wisdom". I guess if something is repeated enough times, it becomes widely-believed by some, regardless of the facts They use every Google update as a reason to announce that reciprocal linking is dead. And much like their stock market counterparts being caught in a "short squeeze", they can begin to sound shrill, relying on flimsy evidence and emotional pleadings to make their case. All of this noise from these SEO pundits would be of little consequence, except that, like the stock market, there are site owners who rely their advice. For those who have been listening to the reciprocal link short sellers for all these years, they may well have found themselves with a financial loss. It may take the form of a competitive disadvantage that widens every day. Even worse, in order to satisfy their "big name" advisors who despise reciprocal linking, they may have deployed alternative linking methods that were more costly, less stable, or carried higher risk. Running a website presents a large number of decisions to the site owner/manager. As a business manager, whatever you decide to do for your own website has consequences. Taking that one step further, sometimes there are unintended consequences that result from what you DON'T do. So it goes with reciprocal linking. Some sites do it. Other do not, for a variety of reasons. Reciprocal linking may not be appropriate for a site, or the site owner does not want to commit their limited resources to doing it. Choices must be made. There are legitimate reasons to not do it, and in these cases the site owner accepts in advance that their competitors may not be so constrained and their competitors may gain some form of an advantage. In other cases, deciding against reciprocal linking may be solely due to the advice of the "experts" who have been pleading that it is not effective. Here, the site owner is also believing that they are yielding no advantage to a competitor. When they find out months or years down the road that the advice was flawed, they may well regret such a decision. Catching up may be very difficult, for a number of reasons. Website marketing strategists who claim that legitimate reciprocal linking is ineffective are certainly entitled to their opinions, but the site owner who is looking to them for guidance must also realize that they are not being provided with any definitive proof of such statements. The pundit's can easily make these claims and sound convincing, but rarely do they suffer the consequences of their own advice. It is the site owner that follows their misguided advice that takes the financial hit, in the form of lost opportunity. I appreciate that many sites don't reciprocate, and never will. That's what makes the world go round. If you decide to reciprocate with other sites, just do it properly, graciously, and limit it to other relevant sites. That's how it has been done correctly since the inception of the World Wide Web, long before there were any search engines. Reciprocal linking, when done right, is proper, legitimate, legal, and good for business. The reciprocal link short sellers have a lot of reasons for making their claims, but are their claims based on facts? Or emotional pleadings? Will taking their advice help your own site, or simply leave the door wide open to a competitor who chooses to ignore them? Best regards, Dirk Johnson
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