A few reciprocal links OK?

[BobGW]

Is a little bit of interlinking between 2 sites beneficial? When is interlinking between enough friends' sites considered reciprocal?

Thanks.

[Gordon_Hall]

I often ask my clients if they would be prepared to introduce the reciprocating site as their business partner in a meeting? once they look down the list and see they have gambling and porn as their business partners, they soon get the point.

Is the link relevant? Do they actually validate your service/product in the real world? Would they link to you regardless if the link wasn't reciprocal? If you had to make a real effort to gain that link, would you have bothered?

[irvingw]

you're only passing PR back and forth and increasing the chance of getting flagged. I don't recommend it.

[Gordon_Hall]

Plenty of sites link between each other - distilled and SEO moz for instance. The question is what are you hoping is the benefit? Are you likely to get any direct trade from link?

[donford]

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and say a couple is not going to hurt you.

It is not uncommon for companies to own and operate multiple websites, businesses, companies. Furthermore, a website may find itself getting some very welcome press from a high authority site like CNN, to which you may post a link back to CNN in reference to the article about your site. This is all saying there are legitimate reasons for sites to interlink and search engines surely can't be going around dinging you for it. If it makes sense for the reciprocal link to exist, then  in a very small scale you should have nothing to worry about.

[jhinchcliffe]

I agree with donford, A few is ok as long as they are relevant and it looks natural. I would never recommend it from directories.

If you or your friend have 2 websites, do a tri-link instead. i.e. you link to his from site 1, he/she links to your 2nd site

[Richard555]

I agree with Brighton College.

Dont do it if your sole purpose is SEO.

[Thos003]

If it makes sense for sites to link back and forth then I don't see a problem.

I'm a local pest control company. I can create a page for other local businesses I would recommend. They can do the same.

But as with anything, don't go crazy with it. If the links are given solely to get reciprocal links then you are in trouble.

[Millermore]

I can see both sides of this argument, however, I'd love to hear a solid answer. I have heard plenty of white-hat SEOs recommend asking family and friends to link to your site when working on building backlinks. As an online marketing and SEO guy for a company, from my perspective, I want backlinks to my site. I'm not going to do anything black-hat to get them, I want them as natural as possible. But reverse engineering this, looking at potential links you could acquire from people you know, then figuring out how to make it as natural as possible. For example, if I wrote a brand new, original and highly relevant guest blog post for a friend that includes a link that is passing juice to my site. If he sends me a guest blog post with a link to his site and we both post them, I am assuming this is a reciprocal link. However, it passes Google's "is it relevant, valuable, natural" test. This act of swapping exclusive, original, high-quality, and highly-relevant guest blog posts - is it considered white-hat or black-hat? Am I going to be penalized? Am I going to gain the benefit of this backlink pointing to my site? I would love to hear an accurate answer. Assume we are not using nofollow tags. Also, let me know what the case is if you do this once, 50 times, or 1000 times, what the difference would be. Thanks!