Reciprical Links

[melaniejk]

Hi.
I was reading about how PR and Serps are based on each individual page and not the whole site. This got me thinking about reciprical links. What exactly is a reciprical link? Is it only considered a reciprical link if both sites are linking to the page that their site is linked from?

Is the following considered a reciprical link?

Site A's page2.html has a link to Site B's home page index.html.
Site B's page4.html has a link to Site A's home page index.html
Both sites are linking to the other's home page.
But neither has the exchange link on the home page.

I hope someone can help clear this up for me. I'm a bit confused.
Thank you.

[jocelyn]

Good thinking... PR is per page so it would make sence.
This may be why crosslinking is more dangerous, linking to pages that have a link back.
Anybody has more info on this ?

[seo guy]

Sadly not the case, linking is domain to domain, not page to page. It is ranking considerations that are page to page, although lately the page reputation of the entire site has taken higher precedence

Site A's page2.html has a link to Site B's home page index.html.
Site B's page4.html has a link to Site A's home page index.html
This is a reciprocal link

[melaniejk]

Thanks for clearing that up.

[eCommando]

so, it means when you exchange links, it's a reciprocal linking and Google doesn't like that?


[QUOTE=seo guy]Sadly not the case, linking is domain to domain, not page to page. It is ranking considerations that are page to page, although lately the page reputation of the entire site has taken higher precedence

Site A's page2.html has a link to Site B's home page index.html.
Site B's page4.html has a link to Site A's home page index.html
This is a reciprocal link[/QUOTE]

[seo guy]

Google has no problem at all with reciprocal linking, if its on topic. A general rule of thumb is to ask yourself, would you exchange links with this person if link popularity didnt exist? In other words is there a benefit to your visitors? If the answer is no, then you probably shouldnt link to that site

[Valkhorn]

Seo Guy,

Don't forget the question "how does this benefit me?"

If it is a chance at better PR then sometimes it's worth it. However I never would really put totally unrelated links on my site (although sometimes I do bend the rules slightly). Then again, if I can gain some decent PR out of it, I would probably be ok with it so long as the link I'm giving to a site isn't a porn/spam/gross link or something.