Reciprocal links – what is still left?
Debates are continuing on the usefulness on reciprocal links on various webmaster forums, many webmasters assume that reciprocal links has absolutely no value in search engines ranking, and even it leads to some kind of penalty. In general reciprocal links can be useful and harmful both, you have to make sure your safety the following guideline are to help you.

The reciprocal links obvious from its name is a pair of links between two sites pointing towards each others. These links definitely has some value in page rank evaluation. Many small business websites and personal web pages who cannot afford costly one way links are heavily dependent on it. The other reason is there are lots of reciprocal link exchange directories are in existence and none of them have any better arrangement for one way and three way link promotion. I have seen the members of many link directories getting good page rank.

The dark side of reciprocal linking
One threat is removal of partners link anytime on the other end to gain the advantage as the new link will be treated as one way. In case if you participate such program then I strongly recommend regular verification of your links, this you can do once those pages are indexed by Google by following commands;

site:example.com yourdomain.com

There can be other situation when the person who is initiating a link request may put deceptive link to trick you, all he has to create an anchor text without any URL associated with it anchor text are given blue color and hover effect using CSS. JavaScript functions can be used to display your link in the browsers status bar, a typical code looks like this; onmouseover="window.status=http://www.yourdomain.com. When you click nothing happens, to make sure you are fooled they can redirect link to your page.

Most of the time reciprocal link pages are loaded with hundreds of back links as the number of link increases the page rank flow for each link decrease drastically; this is evident when you look at basic PR calculation formulae.

In some case the treacherous webmaster will make sure that your link will not be indexed by search engine and they will get purely one way link. This is quite easy add the following line in robot.txt to disallow the bots from crawling them

User-agent: *
Disallow: your-link-page.html

Those drawbacks were from the human side, now look at what search engine can do, as widely said reciprocal links are a way to get penalized but I think you can’t be penalized for reciprocal links unless you cross the limits at least for now.

What you must do
I do not force you to abandon the reciprocal link exchange completely, in particular situation what you can do is exchange selectively with quality sites. Quality doesn’t mean that you always look at Page rank but the originality and usefulness of the site.

When webmasters launch new site its rather difficult to get quality back links, Many times in order to get back links webmasters desperately join the link exchange programs and do lots of linking, a better alternative is to ask links from quality site and offer them link from your home page where PR is high and crawling rate/traffic is more. 

When you get a link request then always make sure that on which page your link will be placed, nowadays its common to create a separate link pages and stuff them with hundreds of links those are worst type of links and easily identified by search engines.

Always verify the correct anchor text link by viewing the html source of link page.
Keeping the number of outgoing links from your site limited will make you trustworthy in the eyes of honest webmasters and you may get free links too.

About the author:

Abhishek Kaushik is the owner of http://thesitebuddy.com/.