A common question these days is the issue of the effectiveness of reciprocal links. People have often made compelling arguments for both sides. Here’s my take.
Recips Work
I think reciprocal links never really stopped working, it’s just that Google got better at detecting relevancy. Before it seemed like Google used to count all recips regardless of whether or not the two sites were relevant, but now far fewer are passing juice. Recips from pages that have a high probability of being unrelated, and who reciprocate with plenty of other unrelated sites more than likely had their links discounted. But there were still some recips that counted between pages that were on the same topic. I think Google is too advanced to discount or give credit for all recips, and still give the same amount of credit for links between two sites in similar categories, regardless of whether or not they’re reciprocated.
This is often why you look at some competitors sites and conclude that all they really have going for them is links on other sites links pages, and they’re still ranking real well in the search engines. Although lots of those links may not count since they’re from old school unrelated sites like mentioned above, there are still likely more than a few that are from sites that only linked out to sites within the niche and who are passing the majority of the overall link juice.
How to Find the Juicy Sites
In order to make it easier to figure out which of the reciprocal links might be the few that are passing juice, you can run some queries in Yahoo utilizing the linkdomain command. The first query I would do is something like: linkdomain:competitorssite.com intitle:”key phrase”. If a site has the keyword phrase you’re targeting in the page title, it is a decent relevancy signal and the page is worth examining. If there are links only to related sites on that page, then it is a link worth getting, and you should have no qualms about linking out to that page from your own site.