Reciprocal Linking Good or Bad?

Today in the internet world, you will see various internet forums, web pages, blogs, and other articles talking about reciprocal linking. Often times, these sources state that reciprocal linking is evil, and is of the devil. They talk about how these links will hurt your search engine ranking, hurt your site, and heaven forbid hurt your precious Google Page Rank.

I got news for you, don;t believe everything you read. Its your web site, link to and trade links with whoever you want. As a matter of fact, I have observed Bing seems to encourage outbound links and links to sites of high quality that are related to your web site. So linking to a site of good quality that is closely related to your site may in fact be in your benefit. I personally can’t see two sites that are focused on cataloging dinosaur bones linking to each other to be a bad thing at all!

Now Google, and others do tell you to stay away from link farms or link exchange programs. These are different then exchanging links with another web master or a directory. If you own a blog, and you get your link in a blog directory, you then decide to link back to that blog directory. As long as your page is listed in the relevant category for your blog, I personally don’t think it will hurt you that much if at all.  Google Page Rank is over-rated, and I see many sites with Page Rank 0 that rank above sites with Page Rank of 5+ in the SERPS. Relevancy is more important in the SERPS than Page Rank.

Sit back and ask yourself a question. If no one linked to anybody, how would anyone find anything on the internet?

This whole idea of stating that reciprocal linking is bad, evil, etc is creating an atmosphere on the internet that is against the founding principles of what the internet was intended to be. The internet was intended to be a vehicle of information exchange. I am not saying anyone should trade links with link farms or spam sites. I am saying that you should be happy to trade links with sites that are related to your own that are not your competitors that have good content.

You should focus your site on your content, and designing your web site for your visitors. The rest will come in time. If you haven’t noticed, all of my SEO tips have been focused solely on good content which is king. Tailor your site for your visitors.

If you think a link may be useful to your visitor, then post it. If you happen to trade links with a page you think is helpful for your users, do it.

I feel there is no problem with Reciprocal Linking, as long as your linking to good quality related content.