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Link Building - What's Wrong With Reciprocal Linking?

What is a reciprocal link?

If Site A links to Site B and then Site B also links back to Site A, then we have a reciprocal link. Back in the good ol' days these links were the way to a search engines heart. But reciprocal links have been much maligned recently. Are reciprocal links fatally flawed?

What's the problem?

The issue is that Google and other search engines have devalued certain links in their algorithms. These links include links from "bad neighbourhoods" and irrelevant sites. That means that a link from a spammy site to yours won't count for much, or worse, will count against you!

A link from a golfing e-tailer to a mortgage brokers won't have much value to Google. Of course, the opposite is also true - a link from the golf site to a fitness site might be quite valuable.

So if the mortgage broker and golf sites have reciprocal links neither site is being helped out much in Google's ranking due to the devaluation in the algorithm. That's the basic problem with reciprocal links.

What can we do about it?

3 words: obtain relevant links. Simply put, but that's the essence of good reciprocal linking. Only add links that visitors to your site might find useful and forget about the numbers.

Google describes this concept like so:

A useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

In fact that last is a great rule of thumb to follow when considering all aspects of search engine optimisation