There is much discussion about reciprocal linking and its effects on search engine ranking. In a recent Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. This crossed the acceptable threshold of Google’s latest filter and caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

Once this new Google Search engine became more and more popular do to the quality of its results a frantic link race was born. Google started gaining market share instantly and the traffic skyrocketed with it. Webmasters began linking and linking to get their clients in Google. Various markets, such as the  real estate marketing industry, were able to see the mass reciprocal link campaigns first hand. It was a simple mutually beneficial relationship; I link to you and you link to me and Google will love us both. While this worked well, it had a primary objective of self-promotion. Some real estate agents were having hundreds of inbound and out bound links.  All they wanted was to increase their link popularity, but the problem was they were not getting links because of popularity they were getting links in exchange for links. A good old you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. Google caught onto this unethical self-promotion and cracked down with a new way to look at links. They started looking closer at the links and created a Google Link Validity process.