Reciprocal Links: What are they?

Reciprocal links are arranged when two web sites agree to link to each other. You may see reciprocal links referred to as "link swaps", "link exchanges", "link partners" and a s "reciprical links". To set up a reciprocal link you must:

1. Find a competing or complimentary site.

2. Put a link to their web site on yours (see if their preferred method is available on their site).

3. Contact the webmaster or owner of the site to request a reciprocal link (emailing a webmaster below).

4. Once the link to your site appears on their site you will need to monitor it regularly.

A good reciprocal links campaign can help your site in a number of ways

The most important of which are:

1. Reciprocal links can help increase your web site traffic (yes people actually do click on the links!).

2. Reciprocal links play a major role in boosting your rankings in search engines as the links are used to measure your
    sites "popularity" (also known as "link popularity").

1. Reciprocal Links Boost Traffic
Reciprocal links come in various guises but the ultimate aim of all is to increase traffic. Therefore it is vital that the page on which your link appears is actually visited and indexed by the major search engines. Many sites just place links on a basic page with links appearing one directly under the other with little other text on the page. This is useless as most visitors would just move on rather than wade through the multitude of reciprocal links.

It is far better for a reciprocal link to appear on a page that contains unique text that is directly relevant to your link! This is important as the visitor to that page will, more than likely, be interested in your link and therefore far more likely to click on it. However it is also vitally important with regards to the search engines (see below) as they, increasingly, search for pages with unique content. Reciprocal links found on such pages are far more likely to be looked upon favorably by the search engines than a link on a page with nothing other than links on it (regardless of the PageRank and similar).

2. Link Popularity
The more links you have the greater the Link Popularity. However, a massive amount of reciprocal links (and correspondingly high link popularity) can, eventually have a detrimental effect upon your sites' listing on the search engines. However, if all of these links are on good quality pages it is highly likely that you will be rocketed to the top of them. Confused? then read on.

A good quality reciprocal link is a link that appears on a good quality page- ie a page that is well linked to, with lots of unique and directly relevant text and images and on a directly related site that is popular in both the number of visitors and the ranking on the search engines. Obviously gaining such links is both very difficult and very time consuming but ultimately worth the hassle. There are a few tried and tested methods of gaining such links but crucial to this is the fact that your site must also meet this criteria.

Catch 22 you scream? Well sort of, you have to start somewhere [ this usually starts with a lucky break] and getting, at least, a few high grade links will soon break the catch. However you are unlikely to get these links if your site lacks unique material! The very first thing you should do is evaluate the quality of your own site and ask yourself if other webmasters would want to exchange reciprocal links with it.

Directly relevant or complimentary - does this mean competitors?
Well you may be surprised to learn that a great many competing sites readily and willingly exchange links with competitors. The simplest way to gain these links is to do a search on the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN) for your competitors. Visit their sites and see what other sites they link to. This will help you in deciding if they are approachable but also gives you a clue to which other sites would be interested in an exchange of reciprocal links.

Complimentary sites are considered a better route to gaining links. A complimentary site would be a site that is somehow related to yours. For example you may own a dog kennel and links from any site related to dogs would be considered complimentary.

Why monitor Reciprocal Links?

Increasingly we see webmasters cheating other webmasters by removing reciprocal links to gain one way links which can, almost certainly, damage your site. There are many other ways in which a webmaster can cheat that you must also monitor but, for now I will leave most of these for a separate page. However it is also possible that things can change without the webmaster cheating!


Examine and monitor the page on which your reciprocal link appears
Even if you have checked a site before and your link appears solid you must, occasionally, pay them a visit to ensure the quality of the page is the same as when your link first appeared. Of course, when a site is redesigned, the pages can change but other, external factors can alter the suitability of a page for housing a link to your site. For example Google Pagerank

Google PageRank
The debate on the importance of a page's Google PagRank in relation to the suitability of housing a link to your site is fast and furious with a multitude of webmasters in total disagreement Google clearly states that it is ONLY part of the algorithm and is NOT as important as many webmasters insist. However I lay a reasonable amount of importance in it as it is a clear way in which we can gauge how Google (and therefore other search engines) view the page and if it is indexed or not (if a page has no pagerank information it is not worth having a link on it! BUT a 0/10 may?).

However, there are many instances of a page having low pagerank but high suitability for reciprocal links! For example this site(www.tartangems.com) has a great many pages ranked at 0/10 but these pages can appear highly on some search engines. There are several reasons for this that are worth consideration:

1. This site it currently getting more new content added after a clear out. For a while now the site has had too little text.

2. We have added many pages which have yet to be pageranked

3. EVERY single page is linked to from within a couple of clicks of the main homepage

4. We have just removed a huge amount of redundant pages which will reduce the number of pages indexed on the search engines. However the long term effect of this will lead to improved listings and pagerank as the quality of the pages will increase greatly.

Reciprocal Links Software
There is a large amount of software available for use by the webmaster to help him gain and maintain reciprocal links but great care must be taken when choosing which software is best for you. Some software is advertised as "Reciprocal Links Software" but does not allow you to add reciprocal links to your site. Let me explain: These programs store the information about the other site in a database and when the link is clicked on it goes to the database to call up the URL and then forwards the visitor to the chosen site. This is called a "redirection Script" and, although still useful for traffic generation, it is 100% useless in most aspects of reciprocal linking!

Also worth considering when choosing software is the history of the company that has developed it! Not so long ago a program call Reciprocal Manager was, possibly the most popular and most powerful software. Unfortunately, during development, the program started to fail. Sadly a fortune was wasted and webmasters who had invested in the product found themselves with a useless product and no support (Reciprocal Manager V4 was abandoned and reverted to V3 but there is still no support).

Get loads of Reciprocal Links HERE