Claim: Unreciprocated links hurt site or page positioning or popularity.
Status: Not supported
The claim is that if you link to sites that do not link to you, you will lose SERP positioning or
Google Pagerank. Ah
the pains of unrequited love!
This claim is almost certainly not true if you are linking to legitimate pages. It certainly is true that
reciprocated links help your popularity. It might be true that non-reciprocated links do not help very much. It is very
very doubtful that
they hurt. For example, suppose there are two similar articles about a new technical breakthrough. One of them links to
a dozen authoritative articles in IEEE journals and to standards documents etc. The other one doesn't link to anyone at
all. Which one do you think search engines will be positioned better in search engine results for the keyword related to
that breakthrough? My guess, my experience, and the advice of many experts, is that the page with links to authoritative
sources will do better, even if the links are not reciprocated. Of course, if you can get a reciprocal link from a
respected source, it is better than just linking to them.
