Reciprocal links work like this. You will put your link on someone else's website and they will be able to list their website on yours. It is a trade off. But, there has been a lot of controversy about these links. Do they work to help improve your page rank in search engines? Do they hurt your page rank? Should you bother investing in them? To answer these questions, take a moment to consider both sides of the coin. The bottom line, to most webmasters, is that they are capable of working for you.
Why They May Not Be Good
When reciprocal links first began to be used, it was a trade off between one webmaster and another. If you were in the home decorating business, for example, it would be beneficial to work with and have a link to a company that provides windows. You both would benefit. When the webmasters did this, they found that their websites did in fact rank better. In fact, it worked so well that they went out and sought more and more of them.
There in lies the problem. Instead of working with other website owners to develop a relationship and create a reciprocal link that benefited both parties, many website developers found that they could buy these links instead. Now, they did not have to go to the trouble of luring in those that they would like to have links from but they could just buy them. Okay, this is not so bad right? The problem was that people were buying and using thousands of reciprocal links on their website. This is completely unnatural and it just didn't work well for them.
But, Why?
The search engines soon became wise to this scheme of getting your website to rank well. They developed programs that would spot this problem and in fact people that used this large amount of reciprocal links, in this fashion, were ranked WORSE! They would spend top dollar to get these links from companies that were all too willing to sell them and would end up well back into the search pages.
So, Now What?
Keeping these things in mind, you need to consider wisely if you should in fact use reciprocal links for the websites that you put up. In most cases, if you take the time to work at getting reciprocal links from qualified webmasters instead of buying large amounts of them, you are more capable of securing a sound method for increasing your page rank. If you decide to purchase hundreds of them and slap them on your website quickly, you will face a worst case scenario of lowering your page rank.
Keep in mind as well that one of the best ways to increase traffic to your web page with links is to use one way links. You can get these by using article directory sites. There may not be a sure fire way to take a brand new site and get it as number one in the search engines, you can gain some movement upwards if you use links properly.
