This article will deal with the importance of reciprocal link exchange – whether it’s important or not.

You must have read a lot about link exchange. This is what you have read – keep exchanging links with high PR (page rank) site, as they will help you to get top ranking in the search engines.

Well its great if you can reciprocate links with high PR site or better still can get an incoming link from them, but you don’t need rocket science to know they wont link to your site if your site itself has a low PR.

Of course if you have a high PR site, webmasters will beg you to exchange links with their site. You choose.

But how many have a high PR site?

Let’s come back to the topic of the site – is reciprocal link exchange important?

Short answer is NO! Long answer is incoming links to your site ARE important.

Why reciprocal linking is loosing its value?

Search engines have systems in place to know the importance of an outgoing link. If they think the link is given solely for the purpose of “link exchange” they do not give it any importance.

There are ways to find this:

1. Too many outgoing links in a page.

2. Irrelevant linking. For example – a site selling mobile phones linking to a site offering information on Dinosaurs found in South Africa centuries ago.

3. Site A linking to site B, and site B linking to site A. In most cases both the links will be neglected by the search engines.

4. Links coming from FFA (free for all) pages.

5. Overall quality of the webpage / website.

I am sure there are many other ways to find if a link is really important or not.

So what should you do? Should you really go for reciprocal linking or spend time building a quality website? My experience says the latter pays in the long run.

It takes a lot of time asking webmasters to link to your site, keeping an eye on who has linked and who has not, and removing links of those websites who have removed the links to your site.

Believe me, its very time consuming. Instead concentrate on building a great website. Write good content. Let your site be of good value to your visitors. If they will find your site good, they will come back again and again.

Good quality incoming links are good, as they are valued by the search engines, but spending time to get incoming links is something I disapprove of.

If you make a good website full of great content or tools then people will link to your site. Concentrate on creating a quality website, and don’t worry about other things – they will fall in place automatically.

Update: I have written an article on how to get great incoming links for your site. I hope you will find it helpful.