Dealing with Non-Reciprocal Links

It is common to have outgoing links that are for the benefit of your customers and that you don’t expect reciprocal links back to your site for.

A good example are links that go to lots of specific book pages on Amazon.com. Clearly such links can benefit your visitors, but clearly also Amazon.com is not going to reciprocate by placing links on their site back to your site!

There is a way you can prevent “leakage” of PageRank from non-reciprocating links on your site, but use with caution. This method is discussed for the sake of completeness and because you may find it mentioned elsewhere. Bear in mind that this method is considered a little controversial, more advanced, and may not work in the future! You are forewarned.

Note: Don’t go overboard fretting over this. This is only an issue if you have LOTS of outbound, non-reciprocating links. Remember that you are leaking PR only from that page or pages that contain the outbound links. So the damage is generally quite minimal.

Most links use a standard <A HREF=”“> </A> format, which Google has no problem following. However, if you use JavaScript code to create your links, Google may not be able to recognize this is a link, and hence PageRank won’t be leaked away for those links.

Bear in mind that Google can recognize some JavaScript-coded links, depending on how the link is coded. Another point to consider is if a human editor at Google would consider you using such a tactic globally as a form of deception – not a good thing.

Lastly, and most importantly, do not consider such a tactic for reciprocal links, as it really is deceitful for the other site owners as they do not get the value of your link counted by Google for their site.

If you are paranoid, you may want to look for JavaScript-coded links (by viewing the page source) on the Links pages of your linking partners if you want to be absolutely sure they are on the up and up.

For information on how to construct a JavaScript-coded link, look anywhere on the Web for samples. The best way is to use an external JavaScript (.js) file to store the URLs.