A topic that seems to be receiving a lot of airtime in many professional organizations is the promoting of reciprocal links.

Inevitably, the message starts off something like this…. "Improve Your Google Ranking" and then goes on to offer an exchange of reciprocal links between websites.

Now there is nothing wrong with reciprocal links as part of a well thought out internet strategy, but most people just do it because they read somewhere it is how you improve your rankings.

The Google search algorithm incorporates a large number of variables of which a major one is the PageRank of each relevant web page.  So the Google calculation of PageRank is an important matter for rankings.  We won't bore you with the math here but links from higher PageRank pages will definitely help with your web pages PageRank.

But a couple of very important things are not well understood in regard to reciprocal links:

  1. The placement of a backlink is very important as well. One link in a veritable sea of random links is not of much value – I am certain we have all seen the Links page with an amazingly eclectic range of links. Google values "contextual" links far more highly, particualrly if the anchor text over the hyperlink is relevant to the page that it is on.
  2. Google gives a PageRank to every web page. So make sure that you get all your backlinks pointing at the page that you want to increase its ranking. This may or may not be your Home page. Often, you may want it to be a product or services or sales page. You should know this before offering any reciprocal links.
  3. Backlinks from web pages with a PageRank of 0 are nigh on useless in helping your PageRank. Be careful, many times the Home page of the site backlinking to your site may have the good PageRank, but the backlink comes from another "Links" page with a PageRank of 0.
  4. If you own a web page that has a decent PageRank, you only have so much "link juice" to hand around. Use it wisely and don't just use backlinks as a simple strategy – you will be giving away far more than you get most likely. The more links out to other sites, the less worth your PageRank is to those sites.
  5. The Google spider certainly does follow links between sites so it can easily identify when there are reciprocal links.  Does it penalise you, not really.  Does it help, not really.

You need to have a clearly thought out link strategy that incorporates all these matters rather than a random asking of everyone to do reciprocal link with your website.

Marshall and Gary