There was a time when a reciprocal link was all that was required in order for your site to rank well. They were easy, find a site that promoted itself actively, add their link to your site, email them telling them that you had, then wait for them to add your link and there you were, ranking well, everybody happy.

However Google since Google clocked on to this, it has slowly been downgrading the worth of these reciprocal links and this is because the search engines are looking for pure, natural links.

If they detect a reciprocal link, they quite rightly assume that there has been a deal made between these sites to try and make themselves rank higher, which of course, isn’t natural.

The search engines, somewhat naive vision (particularly Google) is that the owner of a site, would find another site, be very impressed with the site, and put a link of his site to the site he has found. For example, if a window cleaner went with his family to go and stay in Devon for a week, and he found the hotel and the service so amazingly impressive that when they get home, he puts a link to the hotels site on his window cleaning site, advising anyone who is thinking of going to Devon to stay at that hotel.

Of course the search engines were to be disappointed as this is not how they ended up working. Seo professionals popped up everywhere to manipulate the system. Reciprocal links worked well to begin with, but as one way links have become the most powerful kind of link you can get, SEO has become a more complex task.

Keeping in mind that you can only add a certain amount of links over a month to avoid being penalised for your link building, in order to accumulate enough link juice you will need to spend probably triple the amount of time building links to achieve top rankings than you would with one way links. If you can achieve top rankings at all with reciprocal links.

Although one way links are harder to manage than reciprocals as you cant easily keep track of the link you’re receiving back (not in the same way as reciprocals anyway), they are the most powerful type of link to get your site ranked well. There are rumours that as soon as spring 2010 reciprocal links will be devalued to zero. I do not think that this is very likely as large business will want to exchange links in a fair way with their business partners and suppliers, and surely they should not be penalised for that.

Tags: Online Advertising

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