Are reciprocal links bad?
What is a reciprocal link?
A reciprocal link is a mutual link between 2 web sites.
For example, a business directory may ask you to place a reciprocal link on your web site in return for a free listing.
What is the purpose of reciprocal links?
The idea is that the more incoming links to your site, the higher pagerank you will have thus your site will appear higher in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).
As with anything there is a right approach and an wrong approach.
The wrong approach
You may see lots of sites on the internet offering link building services. These basically utilise link farms, a group of web sites that link to each other. These are viewed by search engines as a type of spamming as the links provide little value to the visitor.
The right approach
Search engines like Google value single incoming links higher than reciprocal links but you can still use reciprocal links if you do it the right way.
Think about visitors to your site, by providing links to other relevant sites you can enhance the user experience.
When Google indexes a site it just doesn't check the links it also checks the pages that the links comes from. If Google determines that the linking site contains content that is totally unrelated to the content on your site then it ranks that link lower than a link from a site containing similar content.
As an example, you may be a wedding cake supplier and you may decide to contact other businesses in your are offering wedding related services such as photographers, florists and suit hire and ask them to exchange links.
As these other companies are offering related services and it is of actual benfit to the visitor then this is seen as good practice.
Placing links to just any old site is not good practice.
In conclusion, reciprocal linking can be of benefit but you must be careful about the quality and content of the sites you are linking from and to.
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