Does having a high number of reciprocal links hurt you?

[nicole.healthline]

I know reciprocal linking isn't ideal, but does it actually hurt your site? Is there any penalty for having a high number of reciprocal links?

[EGOL]

The most probable consequence (not calling it a penalty)... is that the links will be ineffective.

They might help at first and then your rankings will fall when the devaluation occurs..

[seoug_2005]

Do you believe we shoudn't do reciprocal link building at all ? Does exchanging few links with related sites hurts ?

[EGOL]

Great websites link to other great websites all of the time so unintentional reciprocal linking occurs all of the time. So I don' t think that reciprocal linking is the sign of sometimg evil. It occurs naturally. If you are quality linking to relevant quality I would not be concerned - but I would no go out arranging these types of links with other websites.

[AC_Pro]

We have vendors from whom I was hoping to get links.

To make it more enticing to them I was planning to select a small number of vendors (with good site metrics) and create a "Featured Vendor" module on some pages that would link back to the vendor's site as well--thereby created reciprocal links.

I was planning to only have one vendor to one page and only for the pages that we are locally targeting.

Is this a bad strategy?

Thanks!