Reciprocal links

From Wikipedia: “A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob’s website links to Alice’s website, and Alice’s website links to Bob’s website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.”

In general, reciprocal links are bad for SEO and should be avoided:

• They are a clear effort to manipulate the search results which are a big no-no. That’s why Google specifically outs them in their webmaster guidelines. Essentially, they see it as vote swapping. If you have an excessive amount of reciprocal links you run the risk of incurring penalties. (No one knows how much it takes to incur a penalty so it isn’t clever to push your luck).
• You risk being contemplated part of a link farm. If you link to a website that is considered a link farm, and they link back to you, you may be seen as being part of the link farm. Link farms violate the search engine’s TOS and are a quick way to get banned.
• The links themselves bring virtually no value, or worse, root you to lose strength from your pages. Because the links are on irrelevant pages or pages that have little value for your niche (e.g. wrong context) prevents them from holding any value in the search engine’s eyes. What little value they may have to get lost when you send a link back to their website thus reversing any value that link may have had. Even worse, if your link is “worth” more than their link you will actually be hurting your site with that link exchange.
• Many webmasters are dishonest and will remove your link or hide it from the search engines. No incoming link means no gain for you.

Link exchanges should be saved for websites in your niche that are well established and ahead of you in the rankings.

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