Even to this day, some folks are still wondering if reciprocal link building is effective in the internet community. Well, for the most part, the real answer to this is NO, its not effective. At least when your using it for the main goal of boosting your search engine optimization rankings.
Some people are still working on reciprocal link exchanging for building SEO rankings, and even scarier another SEO company. Being up to date with how the search engine’s look at and rank pages is far different than it used to be in the old days. Search engines got smarter and more complicated with their algorithms which gives little or maybe no credit to those links you put time and effort exchanging with other webmasters. For the most part, SEO’s will look at direct reciprocal link exchanges to be completely useless or even hurt your possible ranking if you do it too often.
So in a search engine marketing perception, direct reciprocal link exchanging will not help your site grow in the results page. For the most part it doesn’t help with SEO, but I wouldn’t completely ignore it.
Reciprocal linking can help send you similar traffic from another highly trafficked site so its not completely ineffective in an overall marketing sense. You can reciprocate links with sites that have similar topics but not in competition. The best sites to reciprocate links with are ones that help compliment each others products or services. For example, a site selling outdoor grills may benefit from exchanging links from a site that sells outdoor spatulas or even outdoor lawn chairs.
To sum it up, don’t reciprocate links with hundreds of sites for the sake of building up search engines rankings. Instead build a few outbound links to compliment another trusted site. Building one way quality back links is the key to success with SEO and I will touch on some ideas in later posts.