Back in the old days of seo (about 2-5 years ago) the best way to move up the rankings was with reciprocal link exchange. This method was simple as all you had to do is find a site that’s actively exchanging links, add a link to them on your site, email them asking for one back, and wait for them to do so. This way, both sites have a link, everyone’s happy.

All that has changed recently however as the value of reciprocal links has steadily been down graded by the major search engines. If you look at it from the point of view of the search engine, they are looking for pure links coming to your site.

If they detect a reciprocal link, they quite rightly assume that there has been a deal made between these sites to try and make themselves rank higher, which of course, isn’t natural.

Google in particular, once imagined an Internet where the owner of site A might find site B and be so impressed that he would add a link on site A pointing to site B. For example, imagine a Plumber and his family from Yorkshire takes a holiday in Dorset one summer. They stay at a lovely little family run hotel and make good friends with the owners. On their return home they add a link to the hotel onto their Plumbing website recommending anyone who ever finds themselves in Dorset to stay at the hotel.

Of course the search engines were to be disappointed as this is not how they ended up working. Seo professionals popped up everywhere to manipulate the system. Reciprocal links worked well to begin with, but as one way links have become the most powerful kind of link you can get, SEO has become a more complex task.

Keeping in mind that you can only add a certain amount of links over a month to avoid being penalised for your link building, in order to accumulate enough link juice you will need to spend probably triple the amount of time building links to achieve top rankings than you would with one way links. If you can achieve top rankings at all with reciprocal links.

One way links are harder to establish initially, harder to manage as they are harder to track, but will achieve your rankings in the shortest time scale possible. Before long, possibly as early as the spring of 2010 reciprocal links will be downgraded even further, some speculation has them valued at zero, but I believe that to be too much as any business will have suppliers and partners who link to each other and shouldn’t be unduly penalised for this.

If you want to build high quality Google friendly one way links to your site, click add url or add url

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