Is Reciprocal Linking Dead?

There was a time when reciprocal linking was a number onepriority among webmasters and SEO's forobtaining a good search engine position, that time alas isno longer with us.

This is in no small part because webmasters are no longerdedicating as much time to link pages. Whyshould they spend hours and hours getting link partners andthen making sure that their are linkingback to them when all they have to do is spend 5 minutesjoining a web ring or 20 minutes a dayupdating their blog or rss feed.

More and more we are using other methods to get siteslinking to us, such as joining web rings, or onplacing keyword rich text ads placed on carefully selectedforums or interest sites. These bring us thekeyword relevancy weight we crave so much as well astargeting the people who actually have an interestin the product or idea we are marketing.

With the introduction of such tools as rss and blogs therehas come a change in the way we develop oursites to obtain a good page rank and a hopefully a higherrank with the engines. Gone are the pages andpages of links to other people's websites and instead we usethe single page blog/feed. We are reachingout to a different audience, an audience that wants to comeback to us day after day after day becausethey have a similar interest to ours. With our blogspotentially being fed to anyone who wants to readit we can give our new customers / readers some usefulinformation as well as ensure a return visitwhich could result in that elusive sale.

Updating our blogs is more enjoyable than chasing backlinks;we are indulging in a pastime we have aninterest in and obtaining a good result for our site.

I still get hits for my older sites from link partners butobtaining link partners for my new site isincreasingly difficult and to be honest I probably won'tchase this time consuming preoccupation withgetting return links ever again. If I can obtain morevisitors and ensure a regular visit from a searchbot as well as use my time reading and writing about asubject that interests me then I will, won'tyou?

My view is that reciprocal linking is dead.Long live the blog.

For more information on rss you can go here.
For more information on blogging go here.

Mark White has worked in I.T. for the last 15 years andcurrently runs 3 websites.http://buy-dvds-online.comhttp://sunspeks.comhttp://tendollardownloads.com/

And administrates for http://freetraffictip.com/members