There are several types of inbound links a website can get, each with a different value associated with them. Here we will explore a few of them:
Contextual
A contextual inbound link is usually a one-way link that appears to be the most natural, and therefore has the most value. This is a link pointing to you within the body text of another website, and links to you with descriptive text. This could be a blog post, news article or other.
Sidebar
A sidebar link is one that appears in the sidebar of a page, and is usually replicated through many or every page of the site. Every modern blog has a sidebar, and is usually filled with links and resources to other sites. Some of these can provide value such as a descriptive text link, versus an image.
Footer
A footer link is one that appears in every page way down at the bottom of the page. It usually contains credits to the companies that design, build and host a website. These are considered to be lower in value than a contextual or sidebar link.
Reciprocal
Reciprocal links are websites that exchange links with each other, usually on a “Links” page or similar. These have been heavily devalued over the years, as search engines started to see a trend of massive link building with sites that were not at all related. Some reciprocal links are good if they come from authoritative sources, the content is related, and are not the majority type of links pointing to the site. Read our other blog post on why reciprocal links are bad.
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Reciprocal links used to be a good way to build links to your site. You would share links with another website on a “links” page or similar. Now, reciprocal links are worth much less due to link spamming. SEO’s would amass large amounts of links quickly by creating link farms, which are hundreds or thousands of webpages controlled by them. The majority of the links would be from “spammy” looking sites that had nothing to do with the target site. Search engines quickly caught on and put far less value on these types of links. This is why you hear “having a handful of quality links is better than having tons of unrelated links”.
SEO’s answered the change by creating “one way reciprocal” links, where they would triangulate links from various sites so they would not appear to all be linked to one another. In other words, site A would link to site B, but instead of site B linking back to site A, site B would link to site C, and site C would link back to site A. They’ve even gone so far as to spread the hosting of these sites far and wide to further hide their footprint, making it a complex scheme.
None of these are good ideas and we never recommend them. The best way to build links to your site is slowly and organically. This is why it takes so long.
Alternatively, it is OK to link to partners, clients and the authoritative sites if the content is related.
