A lot of people think that reciprocal links are useless, which isn’t entirely true.

Imagine you had a natural link from a website because they posted an article or story about you. If you had an article or story from their website which you’d like to put in your blog it means you would lose all of the link juice. Doesn’t seem very fair does it?

Research shows that reciprocal links are devalued compared to one-way links. So if you have the opportunity to get a reciprocal link from a very powerful website don’t turn it down. However try your absolute best to negotiate a one-way link, it will be much more beneficial.

I’ve recently been posting on various marketing forums and I’ve been alerted to something some people still don’t seem to be sure about.

When optimizing your website for the search engines, backlinks are an integral part of achieving good rankings. The more good, relevant backlinks you have, the more important your website appears to Google and other search engines.

GOOD is the critical word here. The quality of backlinks is very important when building them. An acceptable balance must be reached but quality should always be taken instead of quantity. You’re better off spending more time adding to quality directories instead of many cheap, low PR directories - for example.