Link Exchanges / Reciprocal Links

Link Exchanges / Reciprocal Links

Definition: You approach owners of other websites and ask them to link to you. In exchange you will provide a link back to them. This is a very old technique and one that actually used to work very well. That was up until the Jagger update in October 2005, when Google started to actively penalize websites that over did link exchanges.

This isn’t to say that websites linking to each other will automatically cause you problems; on the contrary, this is a natural act on the web. Consider how often Search Engine Land and SEOmoz link to each other, they do it all the time, but they don’t get penalized by Google. The types of reciprocal links that Google actively penalized are the ones where no value is added for the user and the reason for linking was clearly just to get a link back. So if you have a page on your website called /links.html, and it is jam packed full of hundreds of links to random websites, all of whom link back to you from a similar type of page on their website, then Google may not like it.

Types of links you get: If you do run with this technique, you can probably get anchor text driven links but they are probably going to be from pretty low-quality websites who do not have high editorial standards. You are also very unlikely to get much traffic, as the link will be hidden away amongst loads of other links.

The process: I do not recommend link exchanges as a method of getting links to your own website so I’m going to leave out the process here.