Reciprocal Links - Benefits and Dangers

You've got a great website; search engines love you. Even your website visitors love you and things are going fine. You know that you could always improve your rankings because you're still only ranked number five in Google and number three in Yahoo for your main keywords, though you would like to improve your rankings for them as well as a few other keyword phrases. Like any website owner looking to increase their rankings, you'll likely ponder the idea of exchanging reciprocal links with a related website or two. However, you should be aware that when looking to exchange reciprocal links; you'll be putting yourself in the position of walking the line of the seo tightrope. This fine line requires good balance, a good eye for detail and most of all, continued concentration.

Effective Search engine optimization (SEO) requires a good balance of two things, at least generally speaking. Your website must have the proper on page optimization; such as proper page titles, use of headings, keyword focused content and a good internal linking structure. In addition to this, your website must have a sufficient amount of off page optimization methods in place. This means incoming links from reputable websites with varied but keyword focused anchor text.

Obtaining reciprocal links can be considered a viable off page optimization method, but there is a fine line that must be walked not only in regards to the relevancy of the website being linked to, but special attention must be paid to the quality of the website that you choose to exchange reciprocal links with. You must also be certain that the quality status of the website that you are linking to does not change over time either.

Reciprocal links can be beneficial for seo purposes, but only when the websites that are exchanging links are closely related; in other words you should not link to a website that will not be directly beneficial for your website visitor. If a link doesn't add value to your website in terms of the visitors benefit, then it's best not to add the link to your website. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter all the time; eventually search engines will pick up on link exchanges from website's that are very closely related, if they don't already have that ability today.

The reason that reciprocal links can be dangerous for your websites search engine rankings is simple; when you link to a website that has been banned from search engines, for whatever reason, your chances from getting a penalty from search engines increases because of your link; in essence you are endorsing a website that has proved to use some unethical mean to increase their rankings. Just because a website that you want to exchange reciprocal links has good standings with search engines today, it doesn't mean that this website will be sitting favorably with search engines tomorrow.

When exchanging reciprocal links, you must regularly check the status of the websites that you link to. If a website that you've exchanged links with had thousands of references in the search engine indices and a home page Pagerank of 6, but today has very few references and has a Pagerank of 0, you should carefully consider whether or not you want to continue to link to this website. While a decrease in rankings or losing a few pages within the search engine indices are bad enough, but there is a higher price to pay; that price is complete removal from a search engines index, something that you want to avoid at all costs.

Exchanging reciprocal links can be a beneficial endeavor to increase your link popularity and even increase the likelihood of your website being found for certain keywords in search engines. However, if you don't continually pay close attention to the quality of the websites that you're linking to, you might end up falling off the seo tightrope and have to start all over again.