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Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The death of reciprocal linking has been greatly exaggerated. Reciprocal links exchanged between complementary and related businesses can still be an effective method of improving your visitor experience as well as your search ranking. If you’re a website that sells jewelry, and you’re linking with your preferred vendor for jewelry repairs, that’s going to send you both traffic, and it’s going to help both of you rank better for your targeted keywords. The search engines are not trying to devalue these relevant partnerships. Reciprocal linking simply means that two webmasters agree to exchange links to each other’s websites. This boosts the inbound link count for each domain, which in the past has been a benefit for their search rankings too. The “problem” with reciprocal linking is that it got completely out of control in the early part of the century. Automated systems were developed so that people could exchange links with other sites automatically. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but people took advantage of the situation, and exchanged links with anyone and everyone whether related to their particular industry or not.This caused all the search engines to reevaluate their stand on reciprocal links, because clearly people were trying to “game the system”. Ask yourself why you want to add a link to someone else’s website from your own. Is it merely to benefit your search rankings? In 2008, that’s the wrong reason to do anything to your site, and instead you should be asking yourself, “Will this link offer something of value to my visitors?”. If so, and that website is willing to link to you too, then by all means take advantage of the opportunity, and feel free to do a link exchange on another relevant and topical website. Finding credible link partners that are willing to exchange links with you can be time consuming, especially these days, because all of the automated requests get ignored. At Search Commander, we identify and personally contact each and every reciprocal link partner to verify that they are a good fit for our clients. We are currently not offering reciprocal link building as a service to anyone other than clients on monthly consulting agreements. However, here are some more link building ideas from my blog…
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