Reciprocal Links – Are They Helpful ?

One of the very first websites I started in my internet marketing business was a directory site. I built up a huge list of reciprocal links for this website. This directory website is doing well in search engines – but I think it is more because of content (I have almost 4000 pages indexed for this site) – I also have a few good articles with links to this site.

Reciprocal links did help with the ranking but not as much as the work I put in them. I have since dropped the idea of getting more reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links are basically link exchanges – two websites place each others link on their website.

Google attaches a lot of value to where the link to your website is coming from – If it is a reciprocal link, Google will know it is a reciprocal link and as such give it little value.

But I don’t want you to completely get discouraged with reciprocal links. I personally don’t spend much time on working on these kind of links for any of my websites any more. Now and then I get emails asking if I am interested in a link exchange and some of them I accept. They have to meet my criteria for reciprocal links. Here is my criteria:

• The website should have a good PR (no PR 1 and PR 2 and PR 3).
• They should let me put in an anchor text for my link. I use keywords for my anchor text. Without anchor text, I think reciprocal links’ value reduces even further.
• They should allow deep linking. If my website is about ‘make up’ and their site is about facial creams then I would like them to link to my page about facial creams – not to my home page.
• If the two websites (mine and theirs) are related then my enthusiasm for the link exchange definitely goes up.
• If they are ready to link to my website in their content rather than on their links page then again my enthusiasm increases. If they have a blog then I suggest you write back to them and ask them if they would like to link to you in one of their posts – if they say no, so be it – at least you asked.

Do you do a lot of link exchanges (reciprocal links) ? What re your thoughts ?

Best,