I've been reading a lot of nonsense on various SEO forums about reciprocal linking being dead. People screaming and crying because their sites no longer rank well after Google's big Jagger update. I thought it would be timely for me to write an article about what REALLY happened, and what you can do about it.

First of all, reciprocal links aren't dead, not by a long shot. It would be foolish of any search engine to ignore links from one authority site to another just because that other site points back to it. That, in fact, reinforces the value of both sites!

What really happened is that Google got smarter about reciprocal links. They are harder on link farms now, and bogus "directories" of links. So the people who are crying foul probably had most or all of their links coming from these kinds of shady sources.

From my own experience with my many sites, however, it seems clear that reciprocal links have been devalued by Google. All that means is that they don't count quite as much as they used to, but they are still very valuable.

If you follow the philosophy of optimizing for keywords that are not super competitive, though, then you will find that your sites are not affected much, since most of your "competition" isn't really competing for the keywords you are targeting anyway.

Remember Reciprocal Links Have Always Been A Short-Term Solution Besides, reciprocal links should ALWAYS be looked on as a short-term boost to get a site going. You want to get those reciprocal links so that you can get ranked for some less competitive keywords. Once you're getting some traffic, if you're offering high quality content to your visitors, you'll get more links into your site naturally.