Almost everyday, I receive emails from different webmasters / bloggers requesting for reciprocal links. At first, reading their emails were amusing but it’s been annoying lately as the number of emails increased. Considering that reciprocal link is a less effective SEO strategy that rarely works, I’m really surprised at how many bloggers and webmasters are still engaged in this SEO approach.

reciprocal link, one way link

In my observation, most of the bloggers / webmasters involved in reciprocal links are newbies. I had the same mistake when I was starting to blog and hopefully, after reading this post, you will spare yourself from doing the same.

What’s Wrong With Reciprocal Link?

Reciprocal link is a form of exchange link where one blogger / webmaster links to another website in exchange for a link to his/her site.

Search Engines determine the page rank of a website base on the number of links pointing to it. Links pointing to a website are considered vote of confidence to the site. The higher the number of quality links, the better. Now imagine that there are two candidates running for president and they are also the only voters. If one vote for the other and vice versa, no one wins. The vote is useless. Similarly, reciprocal links don’t work because its value is depreciated.

This “I’ll link to you, if you’ll link to me” SEO approach that predates Google, is not only ineffective but is also against Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Hence, using this method to boost your website’s page rank may actually harm your site instead.

It’s also worth noting that doing reciprocal link will only consume a considerable space on your blog and will only clog your sidebar. Why don’t you just use this space for more useful and productive purposes instead.

One Way Link

If you really want to improve your site’s Google Page Rank and optimize it for search engines, you should work in building more one way link to your site instead.

One way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a Hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes “one way” in direction. - Wikipedia

There are several ways you can do to earn more one way link to your website without the need for a reciprocal link like submitting it to free directories or by leaving your comments on dofollow blogs. Or better yet, continue creating useful content and one way links will naturally build up over time.

What else do you think can be done to build more one way link to a site? Or you’re still going to use reciprocal link?

There are alot of bloggers who are still using this approach to boost their page rank and search engine ranking. Do Stumble this post or share it to others so they will know why their approach is not working, why it has done so little or why it has gotten their site banned from search engines.

Thank you for your time. :D

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