Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2006, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

You've probably heard the old saying that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Here at LinksManager, we are committed to shielding you from that kind of "danger" by giving you a lot of knowledge. We try to provide you with as much information as humanly and technologically possible about your account, your link requests, and your links themselves. One example of this information is the Reciprocal Link Ratio (RLR), the fourth item listed under "Account Stats" on the opening page of the LinksManager Control Panel.

At first glance, the RLR - which is reported as the "% of Active Links Reciprocating" your links - seems exceedingly straightforward, a basic math exercise in dividing the number of your incoming links from other sites by the number of your published outgoing links. While the calculation from which the ratio is derived is indeed simple, the interpretation of the result is more complex.

For those of you who hate reading user's manuals, we will cut to the chase and give you the bottomline first: There is no such thing as an optimal or perfect RLR.

There is no such thing as an optimal or perfect RLR.

In other words, a site with a high RLR will not necessarily garner more customers (buyers as opposed to visitors) and better search engine returns than a site with a low ratio. In fact, depending on the nature of the site, just the opposite could be true. For those of you interested in the "how" and "why" of things, here's an explanation.

The key thing to consider when interpreting your RLR is the kind of site you're operating and the type of links you have on it. As with just about everything else involving your link strategy, the buzzword is relevancy. Your site's visitors will be most likely to convert into paying customers if the information on the site and your link partners' sites is intelligent, informative, and, most of all, relevant to the products and/or services you offer.

The same situation applies to your "virtual" site visitors, those search engine crawlers which suck up your site's contents, chew it up, and spit out a page ranking. Give Google a large number of fully reciprocated but irrelevant links and your all-important page ranking will almost certainly be lower than if you posted a fewer number of relevant links - even if a fair number of those links aren't reciprocated.

As a general rule, tightly focused niche sites using LinksManager to full advantage will tend to have a relatively high RLR and equally well-conceived and managed general interest sites will have a much lower RLR.

For example, one of our parent company's sites ATCMonitor.com, has an unusually high RLR (over 65%) because it has an extremely narrow field of interest, air traffic control operations in and around Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world's busiest air terminal. "ATCMonitor.com has a high RLR because the site is in an extremely unique niche and we only obtain links from and link to highly relevant sites," says LinksManager CEO Joel Lesser. The high RLR doesn't seem to affect search rankings negatively. Google "atlanta air traffic control" and ATCMonitor.com appears in the top three results.

Yet in another example, LinksManager's sister site, LinkPartners.com, illustrates the other side of the coin. LinkPartners has an RLR of only 34%, which is typical of broad-based sites that cover a myriad of subjects and genres.

Such a niche site will likely have a very narrow range of link partners and a high RLR.

To look at it another way, think of a site that deals exclusively with lacrosse. Such a niche site will likely have a very narrow range of link partners and a high RLR. Compare that to a site covering the entire world of sports - one of the broadest, most diverse markets imaginable. Generic travel, real estate, health, and entertainment websites - all of which have very broad areas of interest -- are other examples of sites that typically have lower-than-average RLRs.

A very high RLR could possibly send the wrong message to search engines, especially if your links are not tightly themed to your own site which is why relevancy is so important. In most cases, it's acceptable to have a low RLR as this shows search engines that a site operator's link strategy isn't necessarily focused on only obtaining reciprocal links. A low RLR can be OK as long as the links are relevant and useful to the end user.

Regardless of topic or content, it is normal for relatively new sites - or sites starting a brand new linking campaign -- to have low reciprocal link ratios. High RLRs -- like mega-hits per month, good search engine returns and other key elements of website success - do not happen overnight. They develop over time as the site matures, finds its identity, and becomes more attractive to both potential link partners and customers. For one thing, when you publish a link and initiate a reciprocal link request, it may take the other webmaster some time to consider and favorably respond to your request. Or the webmaster may decide, for any number of reasons - some good and some fickle, that he doesn't want to exchange a link with you and ignore the request.

In that case, you can "prune" your link pages of some non-reciprocating links and improve your ratio almost immediately. But be careful what you trim, if you delete too many useful, relevant links simply because they are not being reciprocated, you could inadvertently decrease the appeal of your site to both customers and search engines.

Regardless of topic or content, it is normal for relatively new sites - or sites starting a brand new linking campaign -- to have low reciprocal link ratios.

Quick example. The Library of Congress is unlikely to give you a reciprocal link, neither is the FBI, the U.S. Weather Service, UCLA, Rand McNally or any other major public institution or private corporation (unless you're an authorized vendor of their products.) Accessing information on those types of sites might however be of critical interest to many of your site visitors. Deleting links to that information to boost your RLR could inadvertently negatively affect your search rankings.

Remember the goal, over and above everything else, is to create and maintain a popular, successful website that funnels business to your door. The only two numbers that really matter are the number of people who visit your site and the conversion ratio of visitors to buyers. If you have an RLR of 10% and a Google page rank below the radar screen and are getting a thousand hits a month with 500 sales, you are doing much better than someone with an RLR of 84%, a page rank of eight, 10,000 hits and only 200 sales.

So remember: If your incoming and outgoing links are relevant and benefit your end user, any RLR is typically acceptable. When push comes to shove, we suggest you try to maintain an RLR between 20% and 60% for optimal long term success. And never forget, link quality is always more important than link quantity.

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