If you are just learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) then you have probably heard the term "reciprocal links" thrown around quite often, but what is a reciprocal link? The term reciprocal link simply means I put a link to your website on mine if you put a link to my website on yours. This is also known as doing a link exchange. In the SEO game links are like votes for your site that the search engines look at to help decide which site they should rank #1. So, those who are looking to get their sites ranked higher try to get as many relevant links to their site as they can, which is called link building.
Reciprocal linking used to be a very popular way for webmasters to build links to their sites. However, since Google can recognize when sites are linking to each other these "votes" do not count for as much as if you had received a natural one way link from the site. Many webmasters now consider the value of a reciprocal link so low that they no longer participate in trading links.
