Here is Today’s Tip:

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Try to steer away from reciprocal linking… It is soooo 2004.  There is plenty of evidence to show that reciprocal links have been discounted in recent months by search engines, and may even get you penalized.  In the eyes of the search engines, they want to see natural linking practices.  This means a nice steady stream of links to your site from a wide variety of domains.  Reciprocal links are a natural part of a site’s linking structure, but when the search engine starts to see that over 20% of your links are from sites that also linked back to you, it may look a little fishy.  They might suspect that you are trying to manipulate the system…  keep in mind, these aren’t actual people reviewing your websites, they are complicated algorithms that check for all of these factors.

Anyway… that was a long was of saying that you really shouldn’t waste your time with reciprocal linking scemes.  They are wrong on so many levels:

1. Search Engines don’t like them
2. Most link exchange programs are useless because they link to you from poor pages, or completely irrelevant pages
3. Most of the time, your link will be removed after a short period of time anyway
4. Many link exchange strategies include spamming websites to get a link.
5. There are hundreds of other ways to get quality incoming links without wasting your time exchanging them.  (remember the old banner exchange programs?  They are extinct.  Link Exchange programs aren’t far behind)

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Here are some related articles:

• Why good content is the best way to create incoming links

• Reciprocal linking is dead 

• Healthy Website Linking Practices

Related posts:

• SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #12
• Healthy Website Linking Practices
• SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #18
• SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #14
• R.I.P. - Reciprocal Linking - Deceased 1999-2006