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How To Make Effective Reciprocal Links

Are reciprocal links a negative for your website? Not necessarily. I recall Matt Cutts commenting last year on reciprocal links and how Google views them. There are essentially two forms of reciprocal links – natural and spammed. Let’s look at each of them:

Natural Reciprocal Links:

When commenting on reciprocal links, Matt Cutts made the observation that there would be an expectation for families to link their blogs together and I think we can all see the logic there. Likewise, businesses that have multiple websites are likely to link to each other as well. What about unrelated businesses? (By unrelated I refer to websites owned by different entities.)

You can always make a case for businesses to link to each other. If I sell paint products and you sell general hardware, I will most likely link to you if you link to me. Why? It’s all about what is best for the user. They come to my site for paint products but need a ladder. I send them to you. They come to your site for plaster filler and you send them to me to buy paint to complete the job. These are natural links – they help the user.

However, if my link is placed on a high ranking page and links to a page that you want to promote – that is not necessarily good for the user. Anchor text is also important. You can place keywords in anchor text but you are better off using long tails. In the paint-hardware example, the anchor text for one may read “for all your paint needs” while the reciprocal link may read “for all your hardware needs”.

Spammed Reciprocal Links

I have already addressed one form of spammed reciprocal link, the linking from the a high ranking page to another that is not designed to help visitors; it’s design is to boost PageRank. Other forms include links from totally unrelated sites. For example, linking a paint supply website to a jewelry site. These links cannot be justified as being particularly useful to visitors.

Other spammed reciprocal links include link farms and link wheels. Don’t be fooled by some of the marketing hype that is being touted. These types of links don’t work and generally result in a website being penalised – the exact opposite of your intentions.

Link naturally to websites and, even though the links are reciprocal, you shouldn’t suffer any form of penalty. Having said that, these links don’t carry a lot of weight when it comes search rankings – but then, a link is a link and you are using reciprocal linking to benefit your customers, not scam the search results – right?