Reciprocal links in linkbuilding?

Hi, I'm just wondering whether reciprocal links are good when trying to build up links to your website. Are they great, good, or useless? Will they actually help your website?

Thanks

 

Well based on my experience reciprocal links do help in ranking for your keywords.

 

they're definitely not as good as they used to be but don't hurt.

 

Just see with whom you are exchanging the links. Whether you are trying to get one way or reciprocal link, try to be topical in order to keep away from being penalized.

One way links are definitely better, advisable and beneficial compared to reciprocal links. When going for reciprocal links, try to accommodate the important keywords in the anchor texts as this is the place where you can request to have the anchor text as per your desire.

Prepare variety of titles which accommodates the relevant keywords / key phrases and use them for anchor text while reciprocating.

 

One way linking is the best ie site A and site B links to you without you linking back to them. Reciprocal linking carries lesser weight and has lesser bearing on your link popularity though they do help.

Now, the in thing is 3 way linking ie site A links to B, B to C, and C back to A so it all seems like one-way linking.

 

in my opinion, link exhange is useless for link building

 

why do you say its useless?

 

If you are trading links with a debt reduction site on your personal hobby site to list in a directory of some sort it is not a fair trade.

Many other sites will be suspicious of you and not want to trade links with you if you have shady off topic links on your site.

If people you do not know want you to trade three way links you should do a bit of investigating before just saying yes.

Three way link is just a simple example otherwise google bots are smart enough to trace the complex structure of inter link exchange so just stay on topic imho...

 

It takes a lot of your time but if the other side sticks to their promise and puts your links up, it's worth it. Just stay away from link farms.

 

Well, think about it like this: Imagine Google asks to link exchange with you. You put a link on your first page, they put a link on their! It's a reciprocal link right? Would you still considerer it useless? No! of course not, this link would generate hundreds of thousands visits to your site.

Now, let not be so radical. Every link is valuable depending on its quality, Reciprocal, one way, three way, is only important because of SE indexing, and more specificaly Google indexing...

What is important is:

The place where they put your link on their page. A webmasters can put your link on a page that is not linked to the main site, or in a "garbage link page" (those are never seen by anyone), and even if it's a good PR site, this link would be useless. Or they can put your link on their mainpage visible for everybody.

The number of accesses the site where your link is placed gets is also as important. So, making it simple, the higher the PR is, the more statistical probability you have to be followed.

The relevance of the site where your link is placed. If you sell flower and have a link in a site selling cars, you link will be followed only by chances. Put you link on a non-ethical site, and your site might suffer from bad advertising.

Anyway, same rules of common sense apply as in traditional marketing.

There's also a contradiction between link value for SE and link value for your site. For example, if you write an important article on a high traffic forum, like this one for example, and you sign it with your link, it will certainly generate a lot of traffic to your site, but it's probable that Google won't even count this link, however Yahoo certainly would.

Don't forget also, that your question only makes sense since Google appeared, valuing links between site in different ways depending on an algorithm only they understand, and reveal very few. Google is not the only SE on the place, and according to Alexa, Yahoo is still the site generating more traffic in the world. Continue to value reciprocal respecting, when you can, those common sense rules.

 

Go for one way link, forum posting, directory submission choose a related category for your site.

 

I fully agree. Recip linking certainly has it's place and it's perks. Especially when first starting off.

I've written articles in the past, and have linked those articles here for those wishing to discuss them. I've found that both my article and my thread have done better due to the link swap...while that may be a special case, its still beneficial in some way to both parties.

*shrug*