WebMastersLoom

The Basics

A reciprocal linking program is the quickest and easiest way to get your link popularity off the ground. In fact, this technique is so widely used that there are numerous companies specializing in managing your linking campaign or offering link exchange networks. There is no doubt that reciprocal linking can help your search position and maybe even get you referral traffic from other sites. I have used this technique to successfully boost the ranking of my own sites to #1 position on several key search terms in Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

A Word of Caution

However, the problem is that many of the so called link exchanges are basically filtered out by the search engine due to the number and quality of those links. When a site carries over a thousand or so links most search engines will treat it as a “link farm” and those links will carry no weight at all. You may get penalized for carrying an excessive number of “low value” links. Worse yet, if you inadvertently link to a site that the search engines consider to be in a “bad neighborhood” they may lump you in the same category and filter you out all together. So the motto of the story is be careful who you link to and focus on quality links over quantity. It’s also important that the links to your site are related to your own web site and that these links have value to your visitors. Only quality links will bring you targeted traffic and increase your search engine rankings.

Tools of the Trade

I prefer link management software over link exchanges because it makes it much easier than maintaining HTML manually on your site and its also much easier to find goods sites and control a quality linking program. Also, there are no monthly fees and I can use the software for any number of my web sites without having to pay extra. The best software I have found for this purpose is Axandra’s Arelis Tool. It is by far the easiest and most efficient link management software on the market. Another great feature of this tool is that it helps you find out who links to your competitors and convince them to link to your site. Another thing to watch out for is linking to sites that are not reciprocating. You’ll find that only 20-40% of the sites you invite to exchange links will actually do so. If you’ve already placed a link to their site you’ll want periodically remove those sites that are not reciprocating. However, keeping track of sites that do or don’t reciprocate is no small task. Because search engine do not index every page on the web you can’t rely on them to determine if a site is reciprocating a link or not. The best way is to use a software tool that spiders through the sites of your link partners to find a reciprocal link and to find the free-loaders that are not linking back. Such utility can be down-loaded through this link: Free Reciprocal Link Checker.

Conclusion