Are reciprocal links with a Pandalized site harmful?

[Locutus]

Hi,

We have a reciprocal link exchange relationship with just 1 website, which is in the same industry as us. They do not have a reciprocal link exchange relationship with any site other than us.

Bunches (3-5) of do-follow links to our website  appear on approx 2k pages of theirs.

We provide several hundred links back to them (1 per page).

The links result in some decent traffic exchanged, but nothing significant or getting Pandalized over.

Both our sites are in the 60+ domain authority range according to open site explorer.

Both of our sites clearly got hit hard by Panda.

From a purely SEO perspective, are these reciprocal links hurting us? I have read that Panda has nothing to do with links but I wanted to know if there is a possibly that this may be hurting us. At the time, many years ago, the link exchange seemed to help us rank better.

Thanks.

[guillermoga]

Hi!

Reciprocal links may have a reputation of being spammy but it's not a black hat practice and should't be avoided if it makes sense. It's normal for businesses to work together or share relationships and link to each other.

Just like having and ad, from  a SEO perspective it won't hurt you. I don't think that it will help you very much in your ranking either. I guess that you will get most benefit in the traffic that come from those links as high quality potential clients.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

As you mention Panda is not a link based update so it is unlikely that the links are related to your issues, if (an important if) you are sure your problems are Panda based. Check out this useful analytics overlay tool to see if any important dates pop out of your analytics data and confirm traffic drops around known google updates.

As Guillermo mentions, reciprocals in themselves are not inherently bad and as you say they have brought you direct referral traffic so nothing wrong with that. That being said, bunches of them on 2000+ pages, especially if they are anchor text rich and do follow could be a fine line. If in doubt I would no follow them, but make sure you have identified as best as possible the original cause of your problems before you start making wholesale changes.