In the last year or so, many experts have been saying that reciprocal linking is dead and that one way links have far more weight in terms of search engine optimization.



No doubt there is a certain truth to this; one way links, it seems, do help to get your site ranked high for your chosen keyword. With that said, let me explain first off why this is the case and why reciprocal linking is not dead. I will also suggest that all types of linking should be apart of your overall search engine strategy.

Actually, let me make another point before I go any further. The main reason anyone wants to rank well with the search engines is to get targeted traffic for a desired search phrase. So let's not lose sight of the fact that our main goal is to get traffic and furthermore, quality traffic that will convert.

The challenge that arose with reciprocal linking is that webmasters, left to their own devices, started trying to game the system. They could arrange with other webmasters from all around the internet to swap links with them. This also started to happen with one way links but not on the same scale.

As a consequence, Google, which I will use for this example, started to see unnatural linking, in other words, a new site would all of a sudden have thousands of incoming links.

As a result of this, Google started to vary their algorithm and put more emphasis on one way links over reciprocal links as they were deemed more natural. The whole system of linking is set up like a democracy, the more people who vote for you, the greater your ability to rank higher.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule such as who votes for you. Some sites are considered more important than others, and Google determines this using page rank. The higher the page rank, the more important Google thinks that webpage is.

So one way links are important, but what's also important is where they are coming from. If they come from a bad neighborhood of sites then it may do you more harm than good.

Now, just because Google started to discount the importance of reciprocal linking does not mean that they ruled it out. In actual fact, reciprocal linking is alive and well. To this day, I get a lot of traffic from reciprocal links. I also rank for certain keywords targeted in those linking campaigns.

The key to success as it has always been is to work smart not hard. Get your links in the right places and today, you can get others to do this for you, which can prove to be very effective and provide you with targeted traffic well into the future.

Links, both one way and reciprocal, if placed correctly, will not only help with your search engine rankings but they will also provide you with additional targeted traffic. That is why you should always be linking to your site because the links themselves will bring you traffic outside of the search engines.