Why to Avoid Accepting Friends and Reciprocal Links on Subjects That Are Not Relevant

This may seem like an obvious one, but when first starting out it is a strong temptation.

If you're writing a blog, I would guess that you're doing it because either (1) you have things you want to share with others and/or (2) you want to make money through blogging.

Either way, you need traffic on your blog to make it worthwhile.

One of the most effective ways to drive traffic and increase your site's rankings in the search engines is by getting lots of other sites to link to yours.

The trouble is, people often take a scatter-gun approach and try to get links from loads of other sites even if they're not relevant.

Whilst this will increase the chances of people going onto your site, it will dilute the overall quality of these links because they are generally irrelevant.

• From a search engine perspective, this is decreases the ranking of specific relevant keywords in relation to other less relevant ones;
• It also means you will build an inaccurate idea of traffic, as it will increase the number of people getting onto your site who aren't actually interested (and if you're looking for AdSense clicks this decreases the likelihood of any of those too);
• It also impacts your credibility because it's clear you're just fishing for traffic instead of building an audience based on their interest in what you are writing about

...so, my advice would be:

• If you want traffic, don't just ask loads of randoms to link to you if it's not relevant;
• If someone with a site that has nothing to do with yours asks you to link to them in return for a link, don't accept: why would anyone visiting their site what to read yours, and vice-versa?

There's nothing wrong with trying to drive traffic to your site, but make sure you're focusing on the right audience, to get the right people who will actually get some value from your writing to look at your work.