If you have been reading some of the internet forums, the last Google update certainly caused quite a stir, and it has left a lot of people asking the question “Is reciprocal linking Dead?”.
This latest Google update affected a lot of websites that depended on their reciprocal linking strategy to rank high in Google.
If a webmaster wanted to outrank a competing site, They would work out how many links they needed from different websites with a certain PR rating and then commence a reciprocal linking campaign to out rank their competitors.
This strategy was certainly sound and was very effective. But most webmasters would swap links with anybody and everybody, so long as the site had a Google page rank (the higher the better).
Each link swapped was a step toward ranking higher in the search engines and beating out their competitors.
This strategy may have worked in the past when Google was not as smart, but it appears Google has wised up to this strategy. So, it is not surprising that as Google and the other search engines get more sophisticated that the effectiveness of reciprocal linking has diminished as an important factor for...