What is a Reciprocal Link?

Reciprocal Link: Linking occurs when two or more websites, forums, or communities agree to link to each other’s pages, where each page will have a link to the others. By connecting two sites that share the same market niche or information, both provide feedback to their users. The goal is to share the authority of the most reputable site and mutually benefit from the organic positioning strategy.

Although it sounds beneficial to both parties in theory, it can often be a double-edged sword that can damage your site if one fails to comply with white hat SEO techniques. For example, buying links or not, there is a real relationship between the services/products of the websites.

This doesn’t mean you should rule them out, as not all reciprocal links are wrong. However, if they occur naturally, they bring many benefits, among which are potential leads and a better positioning of your website on the first page of Google.

Link building should always be part of an SEO strategy. Among the links you can implement on your website is reciprocal linking, which requires complex work to separate which links in digital marketing are good or bad; if they are misused, they can damage web positioning.

What Benefits does it Bring to Your Organic Positioning Strategy?

Link-building strategy plays a key role when used properly, including reciprocals. Its main benefit is improving the customer experience by accessing other sites with more relevant information or data, making the search engine algorithms better evaluate the website.

Position Your Website as a Trusted Authority
Reciprocal links help establish your site as a trusted authority or receive some of the authority of the linking site. When you give users access to more resources, you show that you understand what they’re looking for and their problems and that you have enough trust in the destination site to refer them to that source of information. The algorithms that evaluate your site recognize this link and will make your SERPs can rise among the competition.

Increase Your Website Traffic
The links increase your website’s traffic since it attracts potential customers who visit the site where the links are in digital marketing and are unaware of your offer. This increase in traffic is another factor that Google’s algorithms evaluate and value to increase your web positioning. Although you should keep in mind that although external links benefit your SEO, they are not the only factor that helps SERP rankings.

Why can Reciprocal Links be Bad for Link Building?

We’ve already seen that linking can have benefits, but it also carries risks if not done correctly. The reciprocal one can affect all digital marketing of all the link-building techniques.

When used only to improve your SEO, without proper planning, they often result in spam and are annoying to users trying to follow links. In the same way, if used excessively, they will have a negative effect since not all have the same authority and quality. To avoid this, it is essential to exchange links carefully, checking the authority of the site and the quality of the users that will come to see your links.

Google Penalty

Carelessly exchanging links can lead to a penalty from Google since it goes against the guidelines documented by the search engine, especially if you try to manipulate search results. There are two potential penalties:

• Lose positioning in the SERPs.
• Deindexation of your website.
• Some of the actions that will incur a penalty are:
• Buying and selling links that exceed PageRank.
• Excessive reciprocal linking.
• Create partner pages containing lower-quality content for linking purposes only.
• Automate the process to generate backlinks to your site.