A couple of months ago, I was at Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar (which is an amazing event) and one of the speakers made a comment that I’ve been thinking about, and this weekend, I found myself repeating it.
He said that most, if not all of the advancements in Internet technology can be credited to the porn industry. I mean, think about it… If it wasn’t for the online porn industry, would we have the high speed streaming video that we have today?
This weekend I was working with a consulting client and we were mapping out a backlinking strategy as part of his overall SEO strategy. I was explaining how backlinking benefits your website’s ranking in the search engines, and he mentioned that he had received an offer to “link swap” with another site in his niche. After explaining the pros and cons of this to him, it reminded me about what I heard at Underground, and that is the difference between Reciprocal and Cyclical Backlinks. For those of you who are like “What??”, here is what I’m talking about.
When Site A and Site B want to link swap. This is called reciprocal linking, where Site A puts up a link to Site B and Site B puts up a link back to Site A. This is all fine and well, but the search engines have caught on and while it is an SEO boost, this doesn’t carry weight like before. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do this type of link swapping to boost your SEO juice, but it isn’t the best.
The “NEW” thing is something than the porn industry has been doing for years, and that is Cyclical Linking. This is where Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links back to Site A. Usually the robots and spiders that the search engines send out will see that Site A links to Site B, but takes notice that there is no link back from Site B directly to Site A. So, it gives the link from Site A to Site B a little more weight than if there was a reciprocal link back.
I find it pretty funny that right now, all the SEO “gurus” are teaching the value of Cyclical Linking vs. Reciprocal Linking and this is something that the porn industry has been doing for the past few years.
So, what’s this mean? Well, I’m not saying to go out and see what the porn industry is doing to get their sites ranked. However, I would recommend that you think a little outside the box when it comes to building your sites. SEO is more than a game, it is a challenge.
