Reciprocal Links - Friend or Foe? 

If you have a website, then it is a good chance that you have either been approached by someone wanting to exchange links with you or that you have approached other web owners or directories and asked them to exchange links with you. So just how valuable are reciprocal links? Will they now harm your search engine listings? Or will they have no positive or negative effect? The short answer is - a combination of the three.

Since the search engines (especially Google) started to make linking a prime factor in search engine ranking algorithms, people have been exchanging links. For years this worked well for site owners, it added to their link volume and gave opportunities for surfers to find their website. However, most link exchanges are fundamentally flawed due to some of the following factors:

Linking with unrelated sites does not help with your site reputation. Most exchanged links are lumped onto a ‘links’ page which diminishes their effectiveness.

Google can now spot reciprocal links and does not consider them as important in their ranking equation. Having said that, sheer number of links still plays a factor with both Yahoo and MSN Live Search - so even though Google gets over 60% of the search traffic in the UK your reciprocal links may bring you a small amount of benefit.

Reciprocal links with spammy indexes and ad sites can harm your Google rankings because you are linking to them and they are not trusted, quality sites, so you are penalised by association. In return they will not bring you much benefit as your link will no doubt be on a page with tens of other links and from a page that isn’t trusted.

In conclusion, reciprocal links whilst they generally won’t badly harm you site, will not be a massive benefit it either. So is it worth all the effort? Yes, if they are from trusted and relevant sites to your own. There are better linking strategies that will produce longer lasting results, we will look at some of these strategies in the future.