To many reciprocal links ?

google webmaster tools states that "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")" is "....in voilation of googles webmaster guidelines."

any ideas on what excessive would be? 10, 100, 1000, +++ ?

thanks
bryan

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I think the more links you have the better. But links must come from high PR sites in order to get juice to your PR!

I don't think it works like this. It is more to do with linking patterns and % of total inward links.

If all you have is recips you probably will not rank that well. If recips make up a small % of toatl links than evfen if you have 10,000 it won't matter. Google is looking for unatural linking patterns. Sorry if that is not much help..

Does that suggest that reciprocal links are not worth doing? I'm starting to look at ways of improving my own site, and this was one of the things I was going to look into.

Lots of reciprocal links don't add up to much.

You need to appear natural with your linking. If 90% + of your links are reciprocals its pretty obvious that this didn't happen without web master intervention.

My advise is don't reciprocate a link unless it is

a) Highly relevant to your site
b) A good quality resource
and
c) Benneficial for your users.

OK, thanks.

No hard and fast rule on this. If you like to have figure, we all know that everything above 50% is excessive because it is already more than half.

So in this case, the number of links done in reciprocals should not exceed 50% of your total links (reciprocal + one way).

If you want to be more safe, consider having it less (like 10% or 20%)

Just a suggestion, others persons may have other rules.

I have several sites that have ALOT of reciprocol links - and they are still #1 for my key google search terms.

The IRRATIONAL FEAR of reciprocol links is dumbest piece of SEO nonsense that still floats about masquerading as knowledge.

You need other links too - and you need to work a variety of good marketing angles - but don't get stuck in an irrational fear of reciprocols. Or if you do - just realize you are shutting down a good marketing angle.

PM me and i'll give you details to support this.

Any, I believe. Links should be a natural occurrence. People should link to you because the value of your website, not because you want them to. Only then the value of Google PR holds its ground, otherwise the value will decrease and Google does not like that because the quality of the results to the end users will drop by it aswell.

So my advice would be to find a way to make people link to you because they want to.

2 words.. FLORIDA UPDATE... google it

thanks everyone for the input, it was very helpful.

bryan

Hmmm. Are you really sure about that? Making reciprocal linking the 'main stay' of your SEO campaign is a very bad move. I suggest you read this which is based on real world examples before making comments like that:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

Reciprocal linking has its place, but is widely abused as it's all too easy to get carried away with it - as it's a whole lot easire to trade links than to get one way links.

If you only do reciprocal linking in moderation and with authority hub sites related to your theme then those links will carry some benefit (although less now than ever before).

For example, I got a recip link from a hub training site with a unique keyword anchor text and it's been interesting to see how the ranking for this term has dropped over the last year as Google has gradually reduced the weight of reciprocals. Down from #2 to #11.

The rule of thumb with Google is any "easy source of free links" will probably be devalued and where webmasters get caught carrying out excessive link manipulation, rankings will suffer.