Are reciprocal links bad (if overused)

[heleni]

Hi, is it possible that having too many reciprocal links on my website may cause damage to my SEO campaign? One of my main competitors has a page dedicated to links to other pretty relevant companies (probably around 20 in total) but is doing extremely well. Lots of other relevant websites are allowing me to link to them, in exchange for a link back. How many is too many if so? Thanks!

Helen

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Tough call. In general, if used excessively, Google frown's upon it.

Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")

However, I've seen plenty of sites rank very well with just these kinds of links.

1. Link only to relevant pages that you believe supplement the purpose of your site

2. Make sure your link quantity is not unruly - if you have 300 links just thrown on a page, users trying to find a specific link will get confused. Try to add value to your links and make sure they are are manually reviewed.

If you really want to do it right, don't make a links page for the sake of reciprocal link exchanges. Instead, try to link to helpful sites naturally and ask them to reciprocate the link.

And of course, don't link to or get links from crappy sites.

[TylerReardon]

Building off of what Oleg said - Linking back to sites that aren't relevant to your site in any way can only be bad for your SEO campaign. My rule of thumb is to never offer reciprocal links.

There are a couple of ways to get around reciprocating links:

1. Offer to write content for their site on a topic that you are an expert on and place a link in the content

2. Create compelling content that is worth linking to in the first place so the site will want to link to you with out reciprocation.

Creating a page on your site with a bunch of spammy links will only have a negative effect on your SEO campaign. It will undermine the link building.

[MarieHaynes]

Google doesn't tell us how many reciprocal links are too many, but they recently added reciprocal linking to their quality guidelines saying, ask Oleg mentioned to avoid pages that exist for this purpose: "Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")"

Some reciprocal linking is natural.  As mentioned on SEOMoz before, SEOMoz has a partnership with Distilled and they routinely will link back to each other.

I would definitely avoid creating a page like you have mentioned.  It could end up getting you penalized.  (I recently worked with a client who had an unnatural links penalty in their webmaster tools and they had a large number of blogroll links exchanged with other sites.)

A better option would be to offer to exchange quality articles with these webmasters and in the article link back to each other's sites.

[heleni]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I think that I am getting the hang of this ( a little)!

All help appreciated.

[heleni]

Thanks Marie, very helpful advice.

[heleni]

Thanks Oleg.

I have started putting together some ideas for new content etc and won't be making a links page! I will also try to avoid excessive link exchanging.

H