I am writing this article right after  a long discussion with one of my colleague. What we were discussing was the website architecture of a new project. He told me there should be a room for reciprocal linking on this website. I opposed this idea and explained him that it is not at all necessary to create room for link exchange on a professional website.

What is Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking means two webmasters are sharing their links with each other. In better presentation it is like I have two web pages A and B in on two different domain. If I put a link to Page B from Page A and vice versa , it is called reciprocal linking. Another term for reciprocal linking is two way link building. 
The diagrammatic representation of reciprocal linking is:

Page A  <-----------> Page B

Why Reciprocal linking is important

In olden days by this kind of link building , the Page B will be boosted in google with the anchor text on the inbound link from Page A. Page A will be boosted in google  with the anchor text in the inbound link from Page B. 

Reciprocal Linking is no longer working and not effective

Google found that many webmasters are abusing the Page Rank system by doing reciprocal linking even with websites with different niches.  So google start taking de-valuate the reciprocal links.  So now if google detect the presence of reciprocal links , google simply ignore the links and not count that links for website ranking.  So now a days it is not useful to use reciprocal links to boost our websites in google. Considering the time and energy we need to use for reciprocal linking it is not at all useful in website promotions.

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