Reciprocal linking strategies
Reciprocal linking involves finding and exchanging links with other websites in an effort to increase traffic and rankings. While the strategy is relatively simple there are a few areas where you should exercise caution:
- You should always make sure that the site that you are exchanging links with is linking back to you with a link that the search engines will honor. Links done with Javascript, cgi, or which include the nofollow tag will not be counted as links to your site.
- Make sure that your linking partner continues to link with you as there are those that will put up a link to your site and then once your reciprocate will take their link down.
- There are cases of people linking with 302 redirects which may cause Google to assume that your page belongs to the other party.
- Check the PageRank of the page you are linking to. If the page shows a PR0 it could be because its a new page, or it could be a page which Google has penalized. Check it out before you link.
In general while it may be a good idea to do reciprocal linking to increase your traffic and provide interesting links to your viewers, the bottom line is at this point that the only thing that really matters much with regards to reciprocal linking is the anchor text that is pointing to your page. This could possibly change in the future or it might not.
How to find reciprocal links
The biggest problem many webmasters experience is where and how to find reciprocal links. There are many ways of doing this, among them are:
- Email the websites that share the same directory categories as your own site.
- Use one of the many websites that offer link exchanges
- You can use one of the automated tools for finding links, but you should be aware that they need to be used carefully and that you need to compose the emails requesting links to reflect the content of the site you are linking to. Many webmasters of popular sites have so many link exchange requests that are almost identical that they simply trash them.
- My favorite, when you find a site you like take a moment to put up a link to that site on your page somewhere, then email the webmaster and tell him why you liked his site so much you put up a link to him and asking that if he would like to reciprocate could he please format the link in such and such a way.
- Or you could hire one of the many companies who do this sort of work commercially.
Reciprocal links can be a valuable asset to your site and your rankings but they are not always easy to come by and often represent a large investment of time.
The next pages look at other linking strategies in more detail.
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