In a previous life I used to work hard on building reciprocal link partnerships with related websites to get my sites ranking in Google. Some people think this process is now next to useless as Google can see you are exchanging links with other websites with the sole intent to increase rankings and therefore gives the incoming links less weight.
So how does Google know that you are exchanging link? Well, obviously it is because you have a page with a link from your website to the website that is linking to you. Now what I have come across quite a bit are people attempting to trick Google into thinking that the incoming links from the reciprocal link partners are one way links. They do this by trying to hide their website’s links page from Google.
The first two things you need to check on the website you are exchanging links with are the webpage HTML and the robots.txt. In the webpage HTML have a look to make that they have not added a tag. In the robots.txt file see if the links webpage has been disallowed. These bits of coding will prevent the webpage from being indexed in search engine listings, therefore Google will not know that the link to your site exists. To check if the links page is listed in Google, do a site: search specifically on that webpage:
eg. site:http://www.website.com/links.html
Also check to see that there are no rel=”nofollow” tags on the links to prevent passing PR.
The next tactic that is used is cloaking. The webmaster uses a server side script such as PHP to detect who/what is viewing the webpage. If it is a visitor viewing the links webpage in a browser then they will see the list of links and will not blink an eyelid. But if it is googlebot spidering the page for Google’s index then the PHP will detect this and will show it some completely different code that does not contain the links to other websites. You can check if this is happening by viewing the cached webpage in Google:
eg. cache:http://www.website.com/links.html
Cloaking is black hat SEO and reporting the website to Google is likely to get it banned. Blocking pages from Google’s listings using robots.txt or meta noindex tags does not violate Google’s guidelines.
In my opinion building reciprocal links still works and I have seen many sites rank well through just this process. But it is a painful chore, especially when other webmasters are focused only on Google PR and don’t understand how they would benefit from a link with their anchor text from a related website. Plus Google now penalises your site if you are linking to a bad neighborhood so you have to be more careful these days and check every website and the websites they link to! Nowadays there are a lot easier and quicker ways to build one-way incoming links.
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