Avoiding Link Exchanges Means Leaving Easy Rankings on The Table.

Reciprocal Links - Are They Important?

Reciprocation in link building generates probably one of the biggest controversy among SEOs, due to the fact that it can either make a difference or actually break your site's link network. This article is here to scatter some of those myths surrounding reciprocal links.

One thing is certain though, Google is getting better by the semester in finding and demoting low quality link exchanges to zero and even negative values.

Now, disregarding or devaluating link exchanges is not an official policy with the major search engines but rather those attempts to artificially improve rankings through link reciprocation.

There are 2 directions to follow

1. Branching out extensively, in areas outside your industry's frontiers. If you do this you'll most definitely see a few short lived sprinkles in rankings, but chances are you'll eventually end up reciprocating in the ill-famed web corners and this will hurt your hard gained current SERPs position.

2. Keeping within your niche boundaries and building connections; quality standards are kept at high levels, but the down side is that link creation process will be sensitively delayed, only providing a handful of reciprocal, relevant links.

Still, keep in mind that it takes time to build a presence online and brand yourself. The good news is you build a solid foundation for selling your product or service.

After securing a considerable number of quality links pointing to your site, it's advisable to diversify your linking sources and even include some low quality ones; and there is no easy alternative then reciprocal links.

Representative keywords should be used so that added site relevancy is gained with each link reciprocation.

Junky back links are found on high rated websites, also. As long as you don't reciprocate the link, your site won't be affected.

A good way to use link reciprocation is by conducting mutual promotions, where each party promotes the other one within a piece of content posted on their own site, with the afferent link.

Reciprocal links are a great way of building legitimacy and trust when used in a transparent manner. Still it doesn't have to be always two-ways.

Then again, this statement is contradicted by our incorrigible human nature that constantly cries the "what's in it for me" exception.

The way around this human instinct is to created high perceived value content that others feel they have to reference; and reference with a FREE, collateral back link to your own site.

The key is to even be listened in the first place, is to provide your targeted webmaster enough additional, relevant information that he's willing to pay attention to your pitch. And that includes related, relevant content apart from yours.

The wide majority of link building proposals are turned down or simply ignored "thanks" to excessive automated requests. Alternative? Personally address webmasters.

Discounting Reciprocal Linking

Things to consider before dealing with reciprocal linking networks:

1. The majority of them are junk website listings. Actually if you take a good hard look you will find that the top positions are occupied by PageRank 0s. Remember that Google has no difficulty in generating a backlink relevancy report for your site; reciprocation with this kind of dodgy sites isn't a desirable note in your resume.

2. At best, these sites reach 10 pages in length, giving them no chance of ranking even in markets with low to no competition at all.

3. Most of the time sites forming linking networks smell and taste as spam, e.g. keyword stuffing, hype copy, etc.

4. Common sense dictates that ranking in the organic listings doesn't require a presence in these artificial environments.