Issues to Note When Exchanging Website Reciprocal Links

　　Exchanging reciprocal links is one of the webmaster's daily tasks, but there are things to watch out for when exchanging links. The following 7 items are the tricks that are frequently played when exchanging reciprocal links—be sure to guard against them!

　　Precaution 1: Removing the link after the exchange is complete

　　After the exchange, the other party quietly takes the link down after some time, so the link you placed becomes a one-way link.

　　Precaution 2: The other party never actually linked to your site

　　Some webmasters check which external links your site has, then write you an email saying, "I have already linked from site A to you, please link to my site B"—this is a three-way link, and the claim is that it works better than a two-way link.

　　Let's set aside whether three-way links really are better than two-way links. If you carefully check the link exchange records again, you may find that the link on site A was actually obtained by you in a past exchange with some other site, and has nothing at all to do with the webmaster now requesting the exchange.

　　Precaution 3: Using a junk site to exchange links with you

　　Some webmasters, under the banner of three-way links, require that your link must point to their real commercial site, while they link to you from a junk site. The most common form of such a junk site is a junk directory—it has no weight and no real visitor traffic; it exists solely for reciprocal linking.

　　Precaution 4: The reciprocal link itself passes no weight

　　Some webmasters add the nofollow attribute to reciprocal links, and some add a meta nofollow tag in the head of the page's HTML code, so that no link on the page can pass weight—hard to spot without looking at the source code.

　　Precaution 5: The link page may exist only for you

　　Some webmasters, when sending a reciprocal link exchange email, tell you that your site's link has already been placed on the reciprocal links page. You click over and, sure enough, there's your link—and on the homepage, no less—so you link back.

　　But if you look more carefully at the other party's site, you'll find that the site's homepage is not the page you were shown at all.

　　Precaution 6: Making the reciprocal links page impossible for search engines to index

　　Some reciprocal links pages look like ordinary web pages, and the link structure looks normal, but in fact a robots.txt file or a meta noindex tag makes the reciprocal links page completely unindexable by search engines.

　　I suggest that when exchanging links, you consider the Google PR of the link page—if the page has PR, at least it shows it can be indexed by search engines.

　　Precaution 7: Deliberately lowering the weight of the reciprocal links page

　　When a dedicated reciprocal links page exists, some webmasters control the internal link structure so that the reciprocal links page receives very little weight.

　　The most typical method is to place a link to the reciprocal links page only on the homepage or in the sitemap, with no links to the reciprocal links page from any other page, or to add the nofollow attribute to those links. This way, the reciprocal links page can be indexed by search engines, but only one or two pages across the entire site link to it. Such a link structure makes the weight of the reciprocal links page very low.