What's Wrong with Reciprocal Linking?

by Elliot Jarves, 8/17/2007

Plain and simple; a lot!

Reciprocal linking has been so abused by webmasters and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts (term used loosely when it comes to reciprocal linking) that the larger search engines have begun the process of disregarding reciprocal links as irrelevant.

Does that mean you will be penalized for having some? No, you won't be penalized (unless they lead to 'bad neighborhoods') but you will also not gain anything from having them either.

What has brought this downfall of reciprocal linking? Automation and spam sites but mostly automation. Automation allowed for membership sites to be created where trading can happen at the click of a button and your site is updated automatically with the new link page including the new link. Automation also allowed for finding link partners to send generic emails to in the hopes that they would take the bait and link back to you in return for your link to them.

Now, I like automation when done in a responsible and sensible way. But much of the reciprocal linking automation was about getting as many links as possible as fast as possible. Obviously, unless you are YouTube or MySpace, this is very unnatural and has been easy for the search engines to include in their algorithms.

Many webmasters threw all senses out the window in their quest for reciprocal links. They would go after anyone and everyone rather than finding related and quality partners to share links. Some even would say that they did it for the traffic, except that most of the sites that they traded links with didn't have any traffic and they were trading links to get higher search engine placement to get more traffic.

Another fatal flaw of reciprocal linking is the unscrupulous webmaster who buries your link on a page that will never be visited by a human visitor and probably not a search engine bot either. Most webmasters were not taking the time to actually see if the page their link was placed on could be found by the visitors to the parent site and therefore didn't get any search engine benefit or any natural traffic benefit. However, because you were a honest webmaster the link from your site did pass page rank and visitors to the other site and therefore the unscrupulous benefited greatly from laziness.

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