Are Reciprocal Link Exchanges Good for SEO?
September 12th, 2007This is my first post in my category “Question / Answer” - these posts are meant to be short answers to simple questions, not requiring much explanation.
So, question: are reciprocal link exchanges good for SEO?
Answer: No. Reciprocal link exchanges (RLE) have no positive affect on SEO anymore. A while ago in the past you might have had some success in doing RLE, and you will often still see new webmasters posting in forums for link exchanges. However, it is a good idea to stay away from these. First of all, you want your incoming and outgoing links to be relevant to your website’s topic. Nine times out of ten, reciprocal links are not. Now, however, if you are interested in performing a RLE with a topic-related website, that can’t hurt. Google won’t reward you with PR or better search rankings from off-topic links, and, without diving into the design theory behind page rank, having too many outbound unrelated links will just hurt the PR that you have.
But most importantly, remember this: Linking to unrelated sites is of no use to your user and just serves as another potential exit point from your site.
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By Chris Staker on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
Crap! All my recent sites i’ve set up (and by that, I mean all 2 of them) i’ve set up reciprocal link exchanges. And I was wondering why it was so hard to get other webmasters whom with to exchange links with.
By Eric K on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
Back in the day I would do these RLEs. They never really worked well, and the bits of traffic I received from them were untargeted and pretty much useless. Then again, in those days CPM ads were all the rave, so it didn’t really matter if your traffic was untargetted.
By Thomas Sinfield on Sep 20, 2007 | Reply
I have found natural link building, and blogs to be my best form of SEO.
By Nick on Sep 20, 2007 | Reply
Quick tip - Google crawls Digg multiple times a day, so the quickest way to get pages in your site indexed within a day is to submit them to digg. I had some of my articles indexed in google before my front page was.
By Ryan on Sep 26, 2007 | Reply
While you obviously want mostly 1 way links, having recip links with RELATED sites is not necessarily a bad thing.
Also, there is more than one way to skin a cat, if you have related blogs, you can exchange site reviews or reference the other site in your post.
By Geroilitoivok on May 6, 2008 | Reply
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