I’ll link you if you link me? It’s a waste of time. Google’s rank algorithm treats reciprocal links as a wash.
I’ve been getting lots of offers for reciprocal links lately. I ignore all of them. In my case the link would be lopsided. The person begging a link would get a link from a Page Rank 4 or 5 (me) and give me back a 1 or a 2 from a links page buried deep in their site. I would not gain. They would, as soon as they were sure I wasn’t looking, delete my link and get the full benefits of link from my more powerful page.
Here’s my rule: A link must be valuable content. I only include a link if I think that a user on my site will value the link. If a user sees my page as interesting, useful, or valuable, then they will return. A valueless link just drains my own search engine mojo. If it is news that life may be found on mars, then I would include the valuable link and the user will return to MY page to find more valuable information and some valuable links. With a link you are giving another web site a gift. The gift you give must have value to you in return, or it makes no sense to include it on your webs site.
2 Comments
Great article. but i thought reciprocal links have some value. if not as much as one way links, but at least a little?
Syed Taha
Google specifically mentions 'Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")' schemes. They say that using them "can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results".
A few reciprocal links can't hurt, as long as they link to other sites in your 'neighborhood', but links to bad neighborhoods such as link farms and link exchange schemes will kill your page rank. I tried it in within a month lost 2 points on page rank for that site.
Here's the an explanation at google:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356