Where is the best place to put reciprocal links on our website?

[theideapeople]

Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website?  Should we create a "Resources" page?  Should the page be "hidden" from the public?  I know there is a right answer out there!  Thank you for your help!

Jay

[AlanMosley]

i would not get reciprocal links, Search engines look for un-natural patterns of linking, although they happan natrualy somtimes, SE's can see not only your pattern but those you have reciprocal links with.
But having said that, you are on the right track, link out on a page with low PR, include a load of links back to your own site so that you only give away a small percenatge of link juice.

[RyanKent]

Can you share more details about these reciprocal links? What is the purpose of placing them on your site?

[theideapeople]

Hey Ryan. I found a bunch of links through the SEOMoz link tool analyzer that our competitors have. When I visited the link sources, all of them required a reciprocal link to be placed on our website. However, I notice that none of our competitors have a "public link page" where these reciprocals might be. Therein was my question... Jay

[Gyi]

While I generally agree with Alan above, if you're going to do recip links, I'd try to work them into the context of your site on different pages.

[RyanKent]

Generally speaking, I would recommend that you do NOT copy these links from your competitor. The optimal way to use an analysis of a competitor's backlink profile is so you can copy the good links and leave the bad ones.

If you want to search your competitor's site for these links, you can try using the site: operator in Google, or perhaps the specific site's own search box.

There are forms of quality reciprocal links. They can be found on a "Resources" type of page on your site. If your site focuses on health topics you may link to the Mayo Clinic, the National Institute of Health, and other quality sites. The purpose of these links are to help your readers locate quality information. Some relevant sites may link to you as well and these links could be reciprocal which is fine.

If you have a "Resources" page where you provide links with perfect anchor text (i.e. "best real estate agent") to sites which are not relevant to yours, that is a rather obvious attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. The links you provide will offer little to no value, as well as the links you will receive. You need to give search engines a lot more credit. You are spending time and effort on what frankly amounts to bullsh*t SEO.

Investigate all your competitor's links. Look for their best links and investigate them. You want ideas, not to copy cat. The best you can do by copying your competitors is to eventually catch up to them. Provide better content, focus better keywords, be more current and relevant, be more authoritative and then you will gain links that a competitor can't copy...because the links you gain have to be earned.

[theideapeople]

Good stuff....thank you for the awesome advice!  I'll heed it.

[MattJanaway]

Agreed. However, it might be worth adding that reciprocal links can also look natural but only if they form a small part of your link profile.

Whatever you do, Jay, dont add a page called links or resources. Make sure the links are contextual links in the content of article's or content.

My way around doing this is putting them in the testimonials pages on my sites

A good example would be when I managed to get a link from Sky.com - in return they requested a link back to their site and I would be silly not to have provided one. I didn't want the link for the juice, I wanted it for the click through's. The reason I'm saying this is to show that not all reciprocal links are seen as un-natural.

[MattJanaway]

Oops. I only just noticed the date on this question! Sorry folks...