Reciprocal Links
Last time we looked at Link Baiting, today we'll briefly explore reciprocal or two way links.
When websites link naturally there is going to be some cross linking within a given community. These are called reciprocal links. In themselves reciprocal links are an asset, when used in moderation and to pages with high PageRank
Beware of link exchanges where websites can buy false authority by trading links or other link acquisition schemes, as this have caused search engines to penalise excessive reciprocal linking. If most or all of the links on your page are reciprocal links the search engines will take that as a sign of ranking manipulation, and penalise you, especially if these links are irrelevant to your page content.
Quality reciprocal link exchanges are not a problem by themselves, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. Websites that trade irrelevant links generally won't be seen as authority sites, and reciprocal linking with them will add more risk than reward.
If too many of your links are of low quality it may be harder for your site to rank for relevant search queries, as search engines look at inlink and outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural your website's link profile is.
That was reciprocal links in a nutshell. Next time we'll take a look at Paid Links