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!
