Don't Sweat Reciprocal Links says Bing


good_evil.jpgBing's Duane Forrester posted a list of Things you should avoid with some common information such as don't buy links, participate in link farms, cloak your content, duplicate content, etc.

While most of this is old hat, there are some new guidelines he posted on tactics you probably haven't heard mentioned before as being "bad".

So, let's review these new bad guidelines from Bing...

Cloaking

Bing doesn't want you to cloak your content which is nothing new. They would prefer that the content you show their Bingbot be the same content that you're showing to your human visitors. While it's simple for Bing to say this, they don't really discuss upcoming issues regarding customizing content for different devices, such as Smartphones and Tablets. This is likely going to be a problem area in the future as more Web sites detect the device requesting the page and customize the output for optimum results. As Bing currently doesn't have a Mobile only bot, this isn't an issue - yet.

Link Buying

Bing says that they will give you no credit for purchased links, if they detect them that is. If link buying is taken to the extremes and it's causing a problem for Bing, they may take action against the sites involved according to Forrester.

We rarely hear of this being a problem at Bing and this tends to reinforce that they don't penalize beyond just negating those links when detected. That said, there is also limited recourse to getting back into Bing should you start to cause them problems. Keep in mind that "causing them problems" tends to mean make them look bad.

Link Farms

Link Farming is also something that Bing advises against. This is where you have a network of sites which link to your content, typically these sites would be under your control, or they might be paid links from a network of sites. Bing attempts to detect and devalue links from Link Farms when possible. Participating in a Link Farm is deemed a more significant violation by Bing than random Link purchases.

Three-way & Reciprocal Linking

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