Backlinks are one of the biggest factor which effects SEO. Back-Linking can be inbound links, outbound links, backlinks or Reciprocal Links. If you want to take advantages of these links you need to use them properly. If you won’t use linking effectively, it might give negative effects to your blog. Check out these articles to get more information about different kind of linking and how to use them efficiently:

• Benefits of Link Building
• Link building tips for your blog
• Benefits and Tips for Outbound links
• Backlink Strategies for Getting High PR

What are Reciprocal links?

This is simplest form of link exchange, when two sites reciprocate link exchange by linking from home page or one of the internal pages. This is one of the oldest form of link building and one of the free link building technique if used wisely.

One biggest problem which came with this is webmaster who have 100+ websites, he can always use it to interlink all sites in his network and thus improving the search engine visibility. Google realizes this could dilute the search engine and that’s why in 2012, in one of the panda updates, Google has devalued such private blog network. Is that mean Reciprocal links are dead? 

More or less my answer is Yes. Reciprocal links are not so useful any more and specially blog roll links. You need to work on other strategy and you can probably consider creating pyramid kind of structure. One thing, which you need to keep in mind is niche of the site from where you are reciprocating links.

Apart from outbound links, internal links and backlinks benefits, we should not ignore reciprocal Links for pleasing search engines and driving huge traffic to our blogs.

Reciprocal links are the links which bind two or more than two websites, directly or indirectly. There can be many kind of reciprocal links. For example, blog A is linked to blog B and blog B is linked to blog C.

There is a myth that reciprocal linking is not effectively for search engines and to drive traffic. But we can see in above diagram that getting direct or indirect linking will surely help you to generate traffic and thus chances will increase to get high rank in search engines.

Here are few things you can do for getting reciprocal links:

I would suggest you to keep many factor in your mind before getting into any such exchange, niche of the site, quality of outbound links from site you getting link back and quality of site you are linking out to. The idea is if you reciprocate link with some other webmaster, you should be getting a genuine and quality link.

• Read: What do search engine think of reciprocal links

The best idea is to write a quality content and drop an Email to other blogger in your niche and ask them to link to their page and in return you can link back to their content with anchor text. Do this only when you are linking to genuine stuff, else you might be the next victim of Google algo updates.

• Try to target social networking website, explore blogs relevant to your niche.
• Mail fellow bloggers for exchanging links and blog rolls.
• Target directories and forums
• Write guest posts and get active with comments (do follow blogs would be great)

The easiest way to get reciprocal links is by exchanging links and blog rolls. You might get good results slowly from forums and web directories. Make sure that you don’t spam and link to only quality blogs.

Well, these are some of the things which I can think of. If you have any better suggestion, feel free to let us know.