martinibuster - 7:08 pm on Aug 29, 2006 (gmt 0)

According to cnvi:

Both Yahoo! and Google state in their webmaster guidelines "have other relevant sites link to yours".

That's about true. Here is what Google's site actually says:

Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

And here [google.com]:

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

And over here [google.com]:

Make sure that other sites link to yours... Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors.

So what that means is that unnatural links are pretty much everything else (outside of expert directories):

Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.

I am being honest: We are here to discuss the creation of both natural and unnatural links (and to get away with the unnatural links). I don't claim that reciprocal linking is ethical or unethical. I'm only pointing out that Google's own guidelines do not endorse reciprocal linking, and that Google's own guidelines are explicit that anything that is not naturally occurring* because of your great content is outside of their guidelines.

Now I ask you, how reasonable is it to refer to reciprocal links as a branding and traffic project? That's like telling the judge you were marketing marijuana for the pleasure of it's taste, and not for getting high (because that would be unethical, right?), so therefore your marijuana sales are not illegal. That claim would hold more water IF they removed the THC from the marijuana (or added a no-follow tag to the links).

If you as a webmaster were doing reciprocal links as a non-SEO, NON-pagerank influencing activity for branding and traffic trading purposes only, then you should have no qualms with asking for a NO-FOLLOW tag to your incoming links, and adding them to your outgoing links.

But I think most webmasters prefer to get high... in the serps. ;)

*Expert directories like DMOZ are the exception, as the guidelines explicitly endorse them. Likely because they are hand edited for quality.

Is there value in reciprocal links? If it's a high quality site, there's probably value in that. How do you judge quality? Ask yourself, if you were a DMOZ editor, would you add that site to the directory?