The Internet is filled with websites here and there offering reciprocal linking services, management, or automated software that handles your link building for you. A lot of individual webmasters spend hundreds of hours, and by that account, thousands of dollars (everybody’s time is worth money; just because you do the work yourself doesn’t mean you didn’t invest in your website) trying to get as many links of all kinds as possible.

Unfortunately for them, they’re at best wasting their time and at worst hurting their site’s ranking. The problem with most reciprocal linking campaigns / schemes lies on the individual pages that the links are traded and the fact that only the links are there, without any other content. While they might have once affected rankings when search was less sophisticated, spammy link resource pages have little to no inherent value in today’s search engine arena, and Google’s algorithms reflect this. They never come up in the regular search results; I almost never enter a query that returns a resource or link directory page on an individual’s site and when I check analytic data on pages that keep link directories I find almost 0 entrances and 0 page views on those “resource” or “link” pages.

Not to mention many of those services solicit links “wherever” they can, which includes sites in “bad” or penalized neighborhoods, and do all sorts of spammy stuff. Many forms of automated software send out spam e-mail templates irritating webmasters in their attempt to beg for reciprocal links and offering worthless links on directory pages in return.

Even if one operates a mini link directory full of links, they are most often worthless, no content link pages that don’t help and could hurt. Google may track both trusted and mistrusted websites, giving positive or negative value to each link. They may also have a separate penalty or ranking decrease for sites that match certain manipulation signatures. For example, if 90% of a site’s links are from reciprocals or they’re linking to bad/ spammy sites on their reciprocal links pages, they’re in trouble.

I think that even if you make sure not to link to any sites that have mistrust, but still take a site and gain 1,000 reciprocal links in a stereotypical link directory way with pages and pages of 10-20 links with no content other than the duplicated anchor text found on other sites, the website won’t rank for anything and the net result of all that link trading would be nothing.

In Matt Cutt’s blog (google engineer and search celebrity), he specifically states that webmasters who abuse reciprocal linking will see negative results. This could potentially be calculated at the website or page level. Any individual site with too many reciprocal links in their link equation (like 1,000) or on the page level (I mean, what value is a page containing 10-20 reciprocals and nothing else?) may have the SEO value of every single one of those links discounted. There may be other penalties as well; search for Google -30 penalty and you’ll find out what happened to some webmasters trying to game Google.

If you’re a new site, I would recommend getting some reciprocals, but find a way to work them into something of value, like your website’s content. Link directories and link pages will not help you very much and are a waste of effort. If you’re only getting a few reciprocals, you can put up a link page temporarily, then move on and spend the rest of your time doing the more important stuff like building content and promoting yourself.

The most effective way to build links from topic specific, high ranking sites is to write articles (real content) and build profile links that link to your website form high page-rank sites.  If you view the source of such a page, and there is “no-follow” written into the link code, the link will not help your rankings with what is called link- popularity.

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