SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

Avoid Reciprocal Linking

The ghosts of SEO past still haunt us to this very day…

I notice about 2-3 requests for reciprocal links per day for RealWebSEO.com usually with automatically generated forms such as the example below:

Reciprocal links sound great, you get a DoFollow link from another site in your industry, that’s a quality link. The only problem with them is the fact that each site links to each other and this is against Google’s terms and conditions – see their Link Scheme page.

I believe it was around 2006 when Google brought out a massive update to the search engine ranking algorithm which was called the Big Daddy Update by some SEO’ers.  This massively de-valued websites that mainly partook in reciprocal linking, some sites dropped out of the SERPs completely!

Why was this update so huge? Google decided that people swapping links wasn’t helping anyone and it was purely done to gain search engine rankings (which it was mainly!).  Reciprocal linking happens naturally all the time especially between two major sites such as FaceBook and Twitter so you CAN do it but make sure it’s only done occasionally.  If you do do it then the links will have little value so it’s a lot better to get out on every site you can think of and get one way links.

For a while roundabout linking worked where site A would link to site B, site B link to site C and site C link back to site A.  Guess what, this too have been weeded out by Google in another update in early 2009, also you may well find yourself linking to a site that uses black-hat SEO techniques and that could harm your site’s rankings too!

When it comes to buying or selling links we wouldn’t get involved just try and play by the rules and there is little risk some big Google update will destroy your SEO efforts one night in the near future.

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