It's been widely discussed that reciprocal links between sites is most often of little value and that 'link to me and Ill link to you' schemes are as old as dirt so...
In 2012 should you avoid reciprocal links between your own pages where possible? They happen more frequently than one might realize.
- Index page links to articles, all articles link back
- Category pages link to articles, most link back via category/tag navigation
- articles link to author pages, these sometimes have 'recent post' links on them
- Sites with members often link to member pages which link back with recent post links
- etc.
Theory - Googlebot doesn't navigate around your site, they visit known pages directly. As long as a page is linked to from somewhere, even if it's from another site, it will not fall out of the index so to speak. All reciprocal linking can thus be removed - but should it be? should some of it be?
Combine that theory with the new push on social where getting your content talked about is more important than ever and you can even make an argument that all navigational links, besides index page to recent articles, can also be removed. Each page will need legs of it's own from social sources so to speak.
Can we tear out reciprocal links and the big gooey mess that is most people's navigational link system? Is it time? With the greater emphasis on social by the search engines have navigational links(which often create reciprocal situations) become less important?
