I received an email this morning asking whether I could do a reciprocal link exchange. Ultimately, I don’t do link exchanges – for one main reason.

Because I know nothing about you. I don’t know about your levels of customer service. I don’t know if you’re any good at what you do. How can I recommend your services, by placing a link on my website, if I have no idea what you’re like to do business with?

I can understand why people consider link exchanges to be worthy pursuits. The more sites that are linked to yours buildings up your search engine rankings. You may have seen some of these link pages – with hundreds of links – a garbled mess.

However, Google is becoming wise to this tactic, and sites that have millions of links at the bottom of their site are not going to win (don’t believe me? Read on…).

It’s about quality and relevance. If I had done business with the company that emailed me, I would probably have written about them in our about page, about how great they are at getting the job done. I would have given them a space for their logo and a link to a relevant page on their website. It’s a quality link and it’s a reciprocal link that works.

What are your experiences with reciprocal links? Or have you seen any examples of horrific link pages? Share my friend…