Opinion on Link Page

[DeWhite]

Hi All,

Are reciprocal link pages considered spam by Google and other search engines? Do they do any good in your opinion? Any harm?

I'm not sure. On the one hand it could be considered an "Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking' but on the other it could be considered a service to our customers to provide other places to look for books. We meant it for the latter and, hopefully, to improve our site in the eyes of search engines.

Thank You for looking.

HISTORY (if interested): There are quite a few books stores hosted by a particular company. Some of the books stores got together and did reciprocal links managed by a single person (which changed several times). This was done some years ago and a new page was developed about every six months, dropping those who no longer were hosted didn't have 'latest page' up, etc. and adding those who wanted to be added and agreed to keep up a current page. Although there are maybe 50-100 of these pages still up, broken links and all, the project has basically degenerated into a single web site managed link exchange.

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:53 pm (utc) on Feb 20, 2016]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

The short answer is that it's probably not going to be a problem. Simply consider that reciprocal links have safely been done under the name of "blogrolls" for years and years. As long as no one publicly exposes your URL and company name and a competitor or a Googler takes action on that reciprocal link scheme information, then in the real-world, you should be safe. However it could be the basis of a manual action, particularly if there's an online confession that the scheme is explicitly for improving ranking.

So you know, keep it quiet.

The long answer
Link development was naively promoted by white hat SEOs as a Google approved "win-win" link building strategy. Because sites tended to rank well with reciprocal links was their proof that it was Google approved. That was of course foolish and I was one of the people who pointed out at the time that Google had never endorsed reciprocal linking. It was only after large networks were penalized that the practice was largely abandoned for SEO purposes.

Spammers pioneered the use of whois and site scraping for the purpose of obtaining email addresses. The also pioneered the use of automation for the purpose of contacting thousands of websites. Thus, there were many black hat SEOs that set up bulletproof dedicated servers to send out thousands of emails per day to obtain reciprocal links. White hat SEOs did it too. That is what led to the various penalties.

Yet reciprocal linking was never really banned. Reciprocal linking happens naturally and it's a common linking pattern among blogs (blogrolls). The efficacy of reciprocal linking is a matter of speculation and personal experience. But as a practice it's been largely abandoned by the industry although now and then we hear of networks rising and falling.