What to do with those reciprocal link exchange request?

If you are a website owner or webmaster, you’ve probably noticed the periodic or slightly more periodic emails from random webmasters or marketers requesting a link exchange. We get several of these ourselves, as well as our orange county search engine optimization clients. And they are always wondering what they should do. In most cases I review them and or tell them not to reply to them and here are the reasons why.

1. Most of the time they are just random sites with no relevance to the site they are requesting links from
2. Sometimes it’s obvious or appears to be obvious that they are using automated scripts to send the request
3. There is a chance that the request are only scams to get a one way link from you.

Back in the day reciprocal linking was big. Everyone was sending out these requests and then came the auto scripts that automated this process by sending out emails and tracking the replies as well as if someone actually placed links to them. Of course it wasn’t long before the scammers jumped on a way to nearly dilute the effectiveness of this tactic.

Putting up junk websites to create backlinks or just as badly sending the emails/scripts to unsuspecting or even well informed webmasters hoping to get a response only to trick them into providing them a link and only the appearance that a link was provided back to them. All of this resulted in Google tightening its belt on such schemes.

Now reciprocal linking still works although with much more scrutiny from the search engines, however if it’s a logical service that should be linked to from your site and vice versa there is no harm. For instance, if you are a wedding planner, it’s quite logical for you to link to florists, photographers, hair stylists etc…No one would find this strange. However linking to some random site on dog training, for example may raise a few eyebrows. I would also suggest that you know that actually web masters and can verify that a link is returned.

All in all our clients are busy running their businesses to be bothered with random emails so we usually take a look at them and then just tell them to ignore them. As always happy climbing!