After reading different posts and threads about link building ,I removed all reciprocal link exchanges on my site.However I am not still sure I have done something good.Anyone here doing like this before and what effects has he seen?
if you remove recop links form your site, then others whom you have exchanged links with will remove your link from threir site also. however, not everyone use automated system to check for links and you will probably have some still linking back to you for a while. if you removed all the recip links, google wil see sudden drop in backlinks depending on how long your site has been up, how many recip backlinks you had, how many of them were indexed by google, etc. if only few backlinks were showing in google then nothing to worry. buy if that was your only link building strategy and had a lot of recip back links, then you should start gettng some one way links form now
There is absolutely nothing wrong with reciprocal links. Excessive reciprocal linking is another thing, though. - Matt
One thing for sure, you will definitely piss off your link partners if you remove that without any notification. One member here did that to me and it sucks! If you don't want to link to another site, find your way to get one way links.
I wouldn't remove them! I had a experience with this before on my one of my sites. I had SEO component on my joomla site Cobramustang.net it didn't work well with the stock link component and completely blocked out the link section. Gave me this "you have to be logged in to view this resource" or something like that. I didn't notice it for awhile. Well, when I went to look at my PR it dropped all the way to 0. Is this because Google new I had dropped them? Maybe, is their search engine that developed? I have no clue... Well get this when I changed to a better seo component, my rank went back up to PR2. Personally I would never do that, it could be regarded as being screwing over the other webmaster. Plus, you wouldn't want a bad itrader score on DP right? I suggest not doing it! That's just my input on the subject!
@yokolucu: Why did you remove all the reciprocal links? I think reciprocal links are probably one of the best link building methods at the moment (beside natural of course). Just make sure you didn't exchange links too many. Exchange link with another quality websites only, don't just exchange link.
isn't that a contradiction? how can something be good if you get "too many" and its bad? I mean websites often need 1000s of back links to compete , can you trade 1000s of links and rank good? Probably not anymore, although occasionally you see an old site doing it.
What is excessive?It is relative. Excessive reciprocal link exchange is according to Google is ???? link exchange so I removed all of them.
Very informative thread. I did the same for one of my sites. I started getting email from link partners they can't see link on my site....etc. There was some drop of traffic. PR stayed same though, I think only because I had 5000+ pages on the site. Link exchange is not bad if you exchange links with related niche. Giving links just to anybody is bad. Also there is a max number of outgoing links (think its 100, correct me if I am wrong) from a page. Best thing you can do now is get backlinks. You have to really work hard getting backlinks now.
Just make sure you notified your partners. "too many" is generally not good, don't you think? Maybe if you spare some time to actually do brief research on each site you wanted to trade links, only give links to related and good sites, this method is still one of the best way. This article http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/010831.html given by Matt B is really helpful IMO.
I don't think so you don't see that many sites in the top results anymore with lots of recips , you used to be able to just trade a couple thousands links and see progress for even some of the most competitive terms, thats not true anymore sure trading 20-50 links won't hurt you , but then how much can 20-50 links benefit you? How many recips do you think you can get before it excessive? is it a base number? a percentage of your total links?
If someone wanted to trade links with me, and I agreed, then they opted out without telling me, I'd not only remove my link when I found out, I'd help spread the reputation that they are not to be trusted in deals pointing to the broken agreement of a link trade. I personally look at link trades as beneficial to both parties, if done on even grounds and for traffic/product recognition. And if both side of the trade are related sites, then such a trade is actually rather natural. If Google wants to penalize me for natural linking, then let them...but know that once they start doing that we are ALL in trouble!
Use this tool to check for people like the poster who removes backlinks without notifying link partners.... http://www.gices.co.uk/LinkManager/
Losing a large list of outgoing links will look out of the ordinary to the Google Bot. Just keep link building and don't panic when something happens in the SERP's. If you radically change your website, that's one of the worst things you can do in SEO.