Reciprocal Linking gnikniL lacorpiceR

Any AdSense publisher who depends on organic search engine traffic is naturally very interested in their search engine results page (SERP) rankings. It’s not unusual (and it’s good practice) to monitor the rankings for key search phrases, especially for those lucky times when you’re in the top 10 results one one or more of the search engines. Anyone who’s been there can tell you there’s a drastic difference in the amount of traffic a #1 ranking gets versus a #10 ranking — you want to go as high as you can to maximize that traffic flow.

For competitive search terms, links to your site have a lot to do with those rankings. Obviously, on-page SEO (good title, use of headings, keywords sprinkled in text) plays an important part, as does the internal linking structure of the site (which are really the only links you can truly control, so you should use them to full effect), but ultimately it’s the links from external sites that are going to boost you up to the top. Getting those links isn’t always easy, but there’s a time-honored method that sometimes makes a lot of sense if you do it right: reciprocal linking.

You Scratch My Back And I’ll Scratch Yours

Reciprocal linking (sometimes misspelled as reciprical linking) occurs when two websites agree to link to each other in order to exchange traffic and/or increase search engine rankings. Back in the old days when pages got ranked almost literally based on how many links they had, reciprocal linking was de rigueur, because it was an easy way to get lots of links. Both sites benefited, so there was really no reason not to do it.

Search engines soon wised up to the fact the reciprocal linking was artificially boosting rankings for sites that really didn’t deserve high rankings, so they started discounting such links in their calculations. The reasoning, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, is that non-reciprocal links (sometimes called one-way links, although of course all links are one-way) are more authoritative — the fact that you link to a site without requiring that site to link back to your site must mean that you really like that other site.

So reciprocal links now have a lot less worth than non-reciprocal links, especially if the links are between pages that don’t have a common theme.

So Scratch My Other Back

Of course, it didn’t take people long to realize what was happening and look for other ways to benefit from reciprocal linking without making it look like reciprocol linking. Thus the three-way link was born. A three-way link is a set of three links that are spread across three sites. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A. Technically, there are no reciprocal links… but there is a path to and from any site. And there’s nothing that says it has to be three sites: you can do a cycle with four sites, five sites, six sites, and so on.

Can’t find anyone to link to in such a cycle? No problem, there are companies out there that will do it for you automatically and charge you a monthly fee for the privilege.

Are Reciprocal Links Worthless?

There’s a belief that reciprocal links are worthless. They’re not completely worthless. You can still get traffic from them (traffic and rankings are separate things). And you still get a small boost from all those links.

The best use of reciprocal links, though, has to be a technique called link laundering, which I suggest you read about. If you’d like to implement something similar, use a subdomain and install the free LinkEX script. Take some topically-related PLR you have sitting on your disk (c’mon, we all have some!) and create a site from it on that subdomain. Just a couple of pages will do, plus a link exchange directory. Insert a couple of links with good anchor text in the content. Then gather some links to the subdomain via the link exchange script. Then you’re laundering links using simple reciprocal linking.

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Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.

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