Current thinking on the value of reciprocal Linking

In about 2006 I recall a lot of talk about G devaluing recipricol links as being artificial and therefore of lower value. Since it is becoming harder and harder to get good quality, relevant, backlinks without a nofollow tag, I am tempted to start a new campaign of recipricol link building with global authority sites related to our key term.

I can find little discussion on the value of recipricol linking, and wonder what the current consensus is.

My question is this - Is targeted (and time consuming) recipricol linking from authority sites a more successful way of improving SERPS than getting much higher numbers of nofollowed links from less relevant forums and blog comments? If you were going to start a link building campaign using only one of these 2 tactics, which on would you choose?

Hi Saint

The good news is that everyone is finding it tough to get good links - this means you do not need to many.

Think of somthing you can give to the other sites in return for the link - are you in an industry that needs on-line tools developed (like payment calculators) make these tools available on your site then tell the other related sites they can link to it.

links from blogs & forums are good if they are targeted and you should use a mix of links, including ones from non related sites - this helps your link building look natrul.

Reciprical linking is not too effective, better if kept in the same industry but not great, one eay quality is the best way to go.

Depending on the sector you are in you will not need hundreds just 20 -30 quality links from good pages on good sites can be all you need.

Reciprocal linking isn't dead because naturally online this is how web sites end up linking, it just happens. As matt cutts says, google and yahoo probably (and do) reciprocal link to each other at SOME point.

If it's from authority web sites in your field then no problem. Switch up the anchor text, don't put more than 50+ link on one page (i do 20-25 TOPS).

Recently I have found the best way to go is to get a low amount of reciprocal links from related websites that have been around for a while and show up in the SERPS and get as many one way links as possible.

I had a site recently that I had built 100% one way incoming links for and it did not perform as well as I had hoped. I added around 15-20 reciprocal links and I hit some great keywords.

It could have been a coincidence but I think that a small number of good quality reciprocal links is a good way to go.

I agree with Djstreet (I'd have "voted" but I have no RP left for U)

In some industries recip's are still the "mainstay" and work prefectly well, and - as DJ said - it's natural that many related websites will link to each-other so devaluation would be counter-productive for Google.

I believe that the "devaluation" of reciprocal links will be mostly related to sites that use recip's for the vast majority of their incoming links, sites that have a whole bunch of recip's together (either in a "links" page/directory or in one or two places... most commonly on the home page).
I also think that this is largely responsible for the apparent "devaluation" of many directories in the last few years (because there were/are many directories where recip's are required for listings and those recip's make up a huge majority of the incoming links).

So I think the answer is to try to make sure that you have as many one-ways as possible, don't be shy about reciprocating with relevant sites and don't have all of your reciprocal links in a bunch or in one page or folder.

I wouldn't waste my time on recipricol linking, but that's just me. Nofollows basically result in the same weight as a recipricol link.

I would buy some links for 3 months as a test and see how that works for you.

I would saw nay on both account.

Nofollow means zero link juice and only 'discovery' of a link. That's not the same as a reciprocal link that does pass relevance. A link is a link is a link according to google, that to me means greater than no follow.

Secondly i wouldn't recommend testing it by buying reciprocals because a) results may take longer than 3 months, b) no idea how many you'll need to make an impact, c) when you take them off flags will go off because you bought a bunch of links!

We spend zero time on reciprocal linking.

These guys will not even trade links with the Pope.

I will go with the first strategy. Reciprocal linking from authority sites is much better than forums and blog comments nofollow links. But then getting reciprocal links from authority sites is not so easy.Your site must have something worth linking to. Again it is all about contents.

Love to know where/how you came up with that Gary

You should take a look at the adult industry if you want to know the value of reciprocal linking... (because buying a worthwhile link will cost you the earth and you will not get any worthwhile free one-way links)... You would find that reciprocal links are still valuable for improving serps with Google, I have no doubt about it. In fact I have a bunch of sitelinks and #1 terms for several categories within a p0rn directory which is "built" entirely on reciprocal links.