Search Engine Result

There are three ways reciprocal links result by biggest Seach Engine,

Google's result page:

• Low authority, non reciprocating site
• Low authority, non reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Low authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• High authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Test page linking to #9 below
• Test page linking to #2 above
• Low authority, reciprocating site
• High authority, reciprocating site
• High authority, non-reciprocating site (keyword in link)

Google supplemental results show the remainder of the testing pages. Missing from SERPs: High authority, non-reciprocating site.


Yahoo's result page:

• Low authority, reciprocating site
• High authority, non-reciprocating site
• High authority, reciprocating site
• Test page linking to #8 below
• Test page linking to #2 above
• Low authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Low authority, non-reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• High authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Link to a blog post that uses keyword as part of the URL

Missing from SERPs: Low authority, reciprocating site, High authority, non-reciprocating site (keyword in link)


MSN's Result page:

• High authority, reciprocating site
• Test page linking to #10 below
• Test page linking to #1 above
• Low authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Low authority, non reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• Low authority, non reciprocating site
• High authority, reciprocating site (keyword in link)
• High authority, non-reciprocating site
• High authority, non-reciprocating site
• Low authority, reciprocating site

We can conclude from that that, all things being equal, reciprocating links have no more or less value than one-way links.

Yeah, I know, we all read Matt Cutt's post about how excessive reciprocal linking can hurt, and I'm sure Matt is right. But the key word there is "excessive".

The Sting of Reciprocal Link

When starting out checking up on this daily seeing if Google, Yahoo or MSN cached the pages linking out and then watching if/when they showed up in the SERPs. The result was quite a roller coaster ride. One day the test pages would be cached and the next day the cache date was from several days prior.

This happened frequently. The same thing with the SERPs. One day all the test pages would show up and the next day gone and then the next day just some of the test pages showed up and the next others, but not necessarily the ones from the previous day. It was interesting to watch.

After about several weeks of daily monitoring trying start to cut back to every few days, then weekly; then, you'll kind of forgot about it with the occasional thought "Hey, I wonder how that test is going", in which take a quick look and forget all about it again. Here we are now, over a year later and I think you can confidently display the results as definitive.

Setup the Linking Test

On one of my sites I created a master testing page. From this page I linked to eight new pages created specifically for this test. Each of those pages contained a few paragraphs of content with the word "reciprocallinksarenotdead" linked to an external web site. The goal was to watch the search results to see what sites appeared in the SERPs for our test term.

For the sake of creating a good testing ground, we linked to four sites that linked back and four sites that didn't. From here we split things up even further by linking to two sites in each group to that we considered to be "high authority" for their industry, and two that we considered to be "lower authority" for their industry. We then split this again using one to link using the target site's keyword in the link and the other not.