With reciprocal linking you as an SEO consultant or web site owner have more control over the quality and quantity of the text links obtained.
Unfortunately if you are starting with a low PageRank (PR) website finding quality reciprocal link partners is practically impossible.
Every low quality website owner and their dog seems to be the main users of reciprocal linking rather than the sort of websites you want links from. Those would be popular websites with reasonable PR webpages that have been online for years, good luck finding those link gems.
How to Ask for Reciprocal Links
“Saw your great site and thought you’d like to reciprocal link, blah, blah, blah… you sell shoes and we sell Viagra, perfect match don’t ya think” :-)
You look at the site and find your link will be part of a large link directory and your link is 10 clicks from the home page on a PR0 page (wonderful, sign me up!).
This is not the way to contact potential link partners, it’s a scatter gun approach and you are pretty much guaranteed a low response rate and those that do respond don’t understand the importance of QUALITY backlinks. When I receive a link exchange email like the one above I know the webmaster doesn’t understand basic SEO and I don’t want to build a relationship with a webmaster who is already making SEO mistakes that could drag my sites down with theirs!
When you get in the position I’m in (many PR4+ home pages) you can pick and choose who you link with. Personally I only setup reciprocal links with people I know and trust because I don’t want to have to check the links every month (I’m a lazy SEO guy :-)), hey I do own over 100 websites, imagine keeping track of all the reciprocal links I could setup!!
Means I rarely setup link exchanges.
What I advise is avoid the standard reciprocal link type schemes: I give you one link you give me one back! Instead find people you trust (look to your industry forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Twitter etc…) and setup multiple RELEVANT links between your sites.
Let’s Build a Link Farm!
I’m not talking about a text link farm here!
Just a reasonable number of pages from your site linking to another site and back again. I try to keep the number of links to well below 10% of the pages indexed or no more than 50 pages (from a large site >1,000 pages), so a 100 page web site could provide 10 links, 1,000 or more page website 50 links max.
Avoid sitewide links as a general rule (link from every page of a site is site wide linking) unless it’s a small site (well below 50 pages) AND relevant to your sites content. What we are talking here is both link partners go to the effort of researching each others websites for relevant webpages to link to/from and manually add the links into the content (contextual links). If I had a reciprocal link partner for this domain (I don’t), from this article I’d look to find a webpage about linking and link to it.
Reciprocal Links Pages
Don’t accept ANY reciprocal links pages, waste of your time and they won’t do much good. Some SEO’s think link pages are downgraded by Google, I don’t think this since there is no need for Google to go to an effort to determine a links page is a links page to downgrade the links, they already are low quality:
Reciprocal links pages tend to have very low PR (PR2 or less) and have a lot of links (less than 100 links is rare except on the really low PR pages), this means the links are low quality and pass little link benefit. Read about how link benefit flows through links.
Also doesn’t help that links pages tend to have no content focus, they tend to link to anything meaning if link theming/niching is important those types of links won’t help much.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Google Penalty for Reciprocal Linking
An SEO client asked a very good question regarding reciprocal linking. A link partner had removed their link because they believed they (the link partner, not our client) had received a Google penalty for reciprocal linking.
Here’s what I told the client:
It’s an SEO myth that they are reacting to.
Basically the belief is reciprocal links are downgraded and possibly penalized by Google (lots of people believe this).
It’s a very easy trap to fall into, a site embarks on a large reciprocal links campaign and gains say 50 PR4+ reciprocal links mostly from reciprocal links pages.
Most webmasters assume by reciprocal linking their PR will increase along with Google rankings. The reality is reciprocal links aren’t a particularly good way to increase PR or search engine rankings UNLESS you manage to gain more PR from it (rare).
A few months pass by and very little happens or some SERPs drop, conclusion Google penalty for reciprocal linking.
That’s how the SEO myth starts that Google penalizes reciprocal links.
The reason why reciprocal linking is unlikely to increase PR:
When you link from a PR4 page and receive a PR4 link back the PR gained/lost (one partner gains one partner looses) is minimal. So unless you are always getting higher PR links in return your PR does not increase OR decrease significantly.
This then only leaves the anchor text from the reciprocal links which will help, but because you don’t gain extra PR (or could loose some) it’s not as effective as one way linking.
There is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking, but don’t expect significant PR or SERPs increases.
David Law
Google Penalty for Reciprocal Linking
Good Reciprocal Links
Very interesting information for an SEO newbie like me. I have been looking for a site that I can get a sitewide link on, but obviously it needs to be a good site, good PR and VERY closely related site.
Hope im doing the right thing.