Concept of reciprocal links has been around for some time now. It is also known as link exchange and is considered to be a bad practice when it comes to SEO. First of all, we must understand what reciprocal linking is, only than we can properly understand its advantages and disadvantages. Link Exchange is name given to an activity in which 2 web properties link to each other.
The concept of reciprocal linking being dangerous for your SEO campaign is somewhat correct but it is not 100% correct. The biggest reason why people fail in reciprocal linking is that they use link to irrelevant and non-quality websites. Google will give you great benefits if you do reciprocal link exchange with quality sites with fewer amounts of outbound links.
While doing link exchange keep in mind following things to make the most out of it:
- Don’t exchange links with websites that are not related to your website’s niche. Otherwise you will end up making your website look like a spam website in the eyes of Google. Getting reciprocal links from niche specific website will make your website appear as an authority website in the eyes of Google, and your visitors will love trust your website more. This will not only increase the rankings of your website but it will also increase the targeted traffic to your website.
- Don’t exchange links with website that are built just for the sole purpose of link exchange, and have nothing good to provide its visitors.
- Never do Two-Way Link Exchange. Rather use 3-Way Link exchange technique to keep yourself away from Google’s penalty. 3 way link exchange means that you will place a link to site A of your partner and your partner will link back to you from some other relevant website. This makes the links to appear to Google as 1 way links not 2 way links.
- Only exchange links with websites that have some age and pagerank. Linking with new and PR-0 websites will not help you at all when it comes to SEO.
For the conclusion, I would like to advise you to not do the old fashioned 2 way link exchanges with every website that you get a chance to link with. Rather do link exchange with quality and relevant websites with high PR, this is the only way to take advantage of this technique, otherwise reciprocal linking can do more harm than good.
2 Comments
Leandra
October 29, 2011 at 14:53for me SEO = offline optimation + directory submission
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November 3, 2011 at 11:31The info is a great help to me, thanks so much for you great article! Reciprocal links are not that good for SEO, 3 ways exchange is much better.
Cheers.