Thread: Are Reciprocal Link Exchange Sites preferable?

I need your views on reciprocal links exchange sites. I have come across websites like Linkmarket.com and Exchanges.net that promise to be the best source to get good site PR. My business associate also told me that this is really a good medium to get a huge chunk of money every month. However, when I researched, I read that reciprocal link exchange is not a recommended service by recent SEO podcasts/tutorials. I also read that on taking advantage of the same, the site’s ranking in search engine will get affected. Before I dig my own grave, I want your suggestion.

I am not using reciprocal link exchange sites due to three factors:

• It generally requires a lot of time and effort to exchange quality links.
• I generally get spammed with requests from sites I would never link to.
• The links you get from the other sites in those networks are often useless.

You would be wise to avoid link exchange software solutions. If you want to exchange reciprocal links with other webmasters, it's best you do this by contacting them directly (but this takes time as Will said).

Link exchanges are old school and no longer a viable link building strategy. The Jagger 2 update back in 2005 more or less killed off the value of the link pages that everyone had on their site. Excessive link exchanges are now identified in Google webmaster guidelines as a 'link scheme' which could result in a violation of the rules. So, why would you want to trade the links?

You could still get some value trading a link now and then with a quality site. But as a link exchange strategy you are wasting your time.

according to my point of view
its completely useless and spam.. and time waste as well..

You have to naturally link out to other sites for it to make sense. Such as to provide extra reading for your visitors or to reference sites that expand on what you are saying in your article.

Direct 1:1 linking is so un-natural.

I fully agree with the comments above. Reciprocal linking is pretty much useless today.

I have also found that about 99% of the time when you get a request for a reciprocal link, it is a scam. Either the page they are linking from is blocked from search engine access or the links are nofollow. The goal of the scammer is to get a good one-way link from you while providing a useless link in return.

Link exchanges are great if you go back in a time machine to let's say 2003. Now they are of little value and can actually hurt your site.

Originally Posted by redfoxseo

Link exchanges are great if you go back in a time machine to let's say 2003. Now they are of little value and can actually hurt your site.

Right, the best way for building links today is one-way links

My view is that link exchange isnt completely useless if you contact the site you are interested and you are satisfied it would bring you value/benefit. However, if it is a case of basic link farm then am afraid it is very useless and could actually bring harm/penalty