When is a recip link not worth it?

[Teddy]

Do you give much thought to the amount of traffic a site is sending you? For instance, I have listings on 80 directories, but together they send me approximately 100 hits per day. That's a lot of clutter for so little traffic.

How little traffic does a site send you before you drop it off? Or, don't you care?

[Gaystoryman]

I think, speaking for myself, that I look at links not for traffic, as I do for incoming links, for se benefits. So for me, traffic that comes is secondary, though we all love to get it.

If the incoming link comes from a place that will have negligable benefit, for SE AND traffic, then yeah, I'd dump it.

but that is me.

Ian

[gaydemon]

Tough question.

I guess it's relative to how much traffic you have as well as what your aim is. If it's just for traffic and no real SEO reasons.

But for me, I would look at:

1. Am I'm sending a much larger amount of visitors than I get in return?
2. Are the links back worth anything in terms of SEO (true URL shown)?
3. Is it taking up valuable space on my page?

But for example on my free sites, I tested lots of different directories but have ended up removing most of them due to the very little traffic I got back. However the reason on them was that it takes time to submit to each one and it wasnt worth the hassle.

It's also worth to note, that in theory you're never penalized or lose anything on having outgoing links on your page in terms of Google Pagerank.

[Teddy]

I'm still kicking this one around. I looked at the links on one of the sites and there were some compelling reasons. Sites that were sending me good traffic were getting lists of sites that weren't sending me anything. It would suck to be dropped by someone because I wasn't sending them a reasonable amount of traffic due to this problem.