Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links Exchange

What is Reciprocal Links Exchange

Reciprocal linking is an agreement between two web site owners to provide a hyperlink within their own web site to your web site. Generally this is done to provide readers with quick access to related sites, or to show a partnership between two sites. Reciprocal links can also help to increase traffic to your web site in two ways. Firstly, you will probably have some viewers visit your site from clicking the reciprocal link directly. Secondly, most Internet search engines take into account the number of web sites which contain links to your web site; the more hyperlinks to your site found, the higher up in the search engine rankings (depending on the search term) you'll find your site.
Reciprocal linking between web sites became an important part of the search engine optimisation process thanks to the link popularity algorithm PageRank employed by Google, which ranks web sites for relevancy dependent on the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link.

For years people have said you need to submit to the search engines. With the advances in search engine spider technology, it is no longer a requirement to submit to the search engines. Rather it is a requirement to submit to topical directories. Reciprocal links and topical directories help you move forward and open the doors for more people and search engine spiders to find your site.

Three-way linking
Three-way linking (site A → site B → site C → site A) is also a kind of reciprocal linking but a special one. This type of linking is becoming increasingly popular since some search engines give less consideration to the value of normal reciprocal links (site A → site B → site A). Some search engines give a higher value to web sites that link to another web site without that web site displaying a return link, three way linking fits this critera while also offering a reciprocal return link from say a sister site.
The attempt of this link building method is to create more "natural" links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links, which are usually done between two domains.

Automated Linking
In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.

Link Exchange
An alternative to the automated linking above is a Link Exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.



Disadvantages of Reciprocal Link Building

I would like to list below some disadvantages of reciprocal links exchange.

1. Time and effort is higher than one-way link building practices.
2. If we exchange links with bad neighbor, our site may get penalized.
3. Good neighbor may become bad in future and put us in trouble.
4. Link exchange partner may remove our link without our knowledge while we still link back.
5. Search engines discourage link exchange.