A lot of people these days completely discount reciprocal links, I was wondering what other people’s opinions and experiences were on this age old technique.
First lets define reciprocal linking – domain1 points to domain2 from a page, and domain2 points back to domain1 from one of their pages.
We mostly condition this with link exchanging, “I’ll link to your site from my links page if you link to mine from your links page” – this method is generally considered a black/grey hat technique, and I really don’t believe has any benefit any more with your rankings.
But what about other scenarios:
Business relationships – suppliers might link to their customers and vice versa to show they are business partners.
Article referencing – if a web site writes a nice article about your site, you might want to show you visitors that you have been mentioned to add credibility to your site or product.
Related fields – a site may want to show their visitors other sites on related topics, these other sites might also wish to do the same.
In-house web sites – your company may have more than one web site and want to network them all together.
These were some of the more white hat scenarios I could think about. So will these impact your rankings still?
