Are Reciprocal Links Bad for your Website

Reciprocal linking is one of the most common and widely used methods for getting back links.  Reciprocal links has been there for a long time and it was considered to be one of the best methods to acquire links to your site.  Reciprocal linking method makes link building  and helps you to improve your website’s position in search engine results.

In reciprocal link building, your site  would get a back link from another site, provided you have place the link of the other site on your website. In short this is a two way linking strategy where both the parties agree to place links on the respective websites. Since you website’s link is placed on other website, the major search engines especially Google consider this as a good sign.
But in the recent times, due to the increased reciprocal linking habit by webmasters, Google have started devaluing certain two way link systems. As a result a lot of questions have been raised regarding the advantages of reciprocal linking. Most of the webmasters considered that the reciprocal linking system is over and almost most of them quit reciprocal link building system, while a few of the persisted with this method.
But in a recent study on the net webmasters have found that the reciprocal link building method have still got its value. If we check the back links of a website having good search engine rankings, there would be a large number of reciprocal links.  This clearly states that reciprocal linking method have still got its importance, but needs to be done in the right way.

The fact is that Google appreciates reciprocal linking provided it comes from relevant sites in a genuine way. If you are using any automated link generating tool  or any similar stuff for creating back link, then you may be on the wrong path. Google does not encourage this mass reciprocal link building strategy with the help of  any tools.

The most important thing to do in order to get better search engine ranking is to make sure that your site has enough quality back links. Never mind if it is a one way link, a reciprocal link or 3 way link. Just make sure that your back links come from a relevant, healthy and genuine site. If your reciprocal link is coming from a irrelevant site which do not have better ranking in Google, then this is not going to help you at all.

If you want to improve your search engine ranking and drive some traffic, then there is no harm in going for reciprocal linking, but that too in a healthy way.