Don't believe the hype: reciprocal linking is a long way from dead.  And for as long as reciprocal links are here to stay, reciprocal link checker software can help you to make sure that your linking partners are holding up their end of the bargain and helping your search engine optimization efforts.  In this guide, we'll take a detailed look into why a law firm might want to use reciprocal link checker websites.  You'll also learn about how Google views reciprocal linking, and how to avoid being penalized for having excessive reciprocal links.

What are Reciprocal Links?

Links can be one of two types: one way and reciprocal.  In a one way linking scenario, someone sees your website and likes the way that you state something.  They put a hyperlink with anchor text on their web page, and it leads directly to your website.  For them, this would be considered an outbound one way link, while for you it would be an inbound one way link.

Reciprocal linking is two-way linking.  If you and a friend both have blogs, you might decide to link to each other's content.  This would be considered reciprocal linking, and has formed the basis of many search engine optimization strategies.

Should I Have Reciprocal Links?

It's not as easy as it once was to base your search engine marketing strategy on reciprocal linking.  This type of linking was once the dominant form of search engine optimization link building.  However, it fast became synonymous with spammy “link exchange” websites that did little but compile links and make it tougher to find what you were really looking for.

Today, if you have too much reciprocal linking, Google may actually penalize your website.  This doesn't mean, though, that you should never use these links.  Reciprocal links can still be very valuable, if they're to give higher PageRank websites.  Just make sure that you don't have too many, and you can still use reciprocal linking as a vital part of your link building strategy.

Reciprocal Link Checker Functions: Monitoring Link Relationships

If you're using reciprocal linking in any form, you should periodically do an audit of your links.  It's critical to run a reciprocal link checker every few months—if you don't, you have no way of knowing whether the people you're linking to are providing a link back like they promised.

The most commonly used function of any reciprocal link checker is making sure that this reciprocity is maintained.  If you find that the reciprocal linking you thought you had is down, you can talk to the owner of the website.  By telling them that your reciprocal link checker found that your links are no longer reciprocated, they can find the source of the problem and fix it—or you can simply choose to delete the link from your own website.

You can also use a reciprocal link checker tool to make sure that the links to your website are as prominently displayed as the ones that you are displaying to someone else's website.  If they're in a very difficult to access part of a website, they may no longer be as valuable, because it may be more difficult for them to be indexed by search engines.

Reciprocal Link Checker Functions: Monitoring Anchor Text

Google considers anchor text similarity when deciding whether a website appears to have been over optimized.  If almost all the anchor text you're getting in your reciprocal linking is the same few words, you may need to mix it up a little.  Running a reciprocal link checker is a good way to learn whether you're getting a sufficient variety of keywords to keep Google's Penguin update from penalizing your site.

Once you look at all of your reciprocal links, you should be able to get a good sense of how many of them are using identical or nearly identical text.  You can then send emails to the webmasters at several of the websites where the identical text is being used, asking for variations on the original text so that your reciprocal linking strategy works better.

Other Reciprocal Link Checker Functions

One of the biggest questions that you may have about your reciprocal links is what percentage of your links they constitute.  By running first an inbound link checker and then a reciprocal links checker, you can look at how many of each type of link you're getting.

Any website that has a percentage of reciprocal linking that exceeds 40 percent or so should be very worried about being penalized.  Continuing to monitor your reciprocal links with a reciprocal link checker can help you identify when you need to seek more one way linking opportunities.  You can easily have 20 percent or so of your links be reciprocal without having to worry much about Google Penguin.  This means that you can seek out link exchanges with attorneys or other professionals to raise your total number of inbound links, as long as you don't use this method to the exclusion of all others.

How to Check Your One Way Links

In addition to checking the status of your reciprocal linking efforts, you may need to also monitor the one way inbound backlinks that are coming to your website.  This requires different tools.  Backlink checker websites abound online, and you can even use Google Analytics to keep track of how many people are coming to your website from each of your one way links.

By monitoring your one way links, you can also make sure that changes to your website don't make it less user friendly.  You can build in redirect pages to help people who are coming to your website from other sites, so that their interaction with your site is seamless no matter how much time passes since you received the link.  Without a redirect page, you'll lose potential new business, and the links will appear to be broken to anyone who runs a link checking program.

Doing analysis of outbound links is still uncommon in most business sectors, including the legal field.  However, if you want to make sure that your search engine optimization is successful and that people are using your website the way you want them to, you need to be able to check your outbound links and track how people are using them.  This guide will explore why outbound link tracking is a great idea for law firms that have a large number of outbound links on their websites.  If you're not already doing outbound links tracking, we'll look at which websites need it most and which can probably live without it.

What Are Outbound Links?

A website that isn't connected to other sites is not likely to be indexed frequently by search engines, and isn't likely to be very popular with the rest of the internet.  In order to get links coming in, you'll need to have some links going out.  Those links, that go from your website to the websites of other people, can be for advertisers or other law firms.  Maybe you just have some links to basic legal resources for your area, or resources for people who cannot afford an attorney.

Why Google Cares About Outbound Links

Search engines actually do outbound link tracking, checking how many outbound links your website has in total.  By doing this outbound links tracking, they are trying to assess how much “link juice” a particular link should be worth.  Search engines don't want to put too much weight on links from websites that may be very easy to get links from.

That's why when Google does outbound link tracking, it looks at the overall number of links from the website, and dilutes the value of a single outbound link based on the total number.  If you receive an outbound link, for example, from a website that has 100 links in total and a PageRank of 5, you'll get a much better spike to your search rankings than if you'd gotten a link from a website with over a million total links.  Outbound links tracking can help you understand how Google is looking at both your website and the websites where you're building your inbound links.

Which Law Firms Benefit From Outbound Link Tracking?

Just about any law firm can benefit from looking at outbound links tracking in order to get an idea of where you can post the most beneficial inbound links.  However, some law firms can receive an additional benefit as well.

Let's say that you're an attorney who specializes in estate law in a mid-sized city.  You have some professional colleagues who went to law school with you, and you tend to refer them business sometimes.  By doing outbound link tracking, you can learn exactly how many people have gone from your website to their website.

This kind of referral traffic can actually start to make you money after you do enough outbound link tracking.  If you show through your outbound links tracking programs that you are sending high amounts of traffic through link referrals, you may be able to make a case for other attorneys paying to advertise on your website, making more money for your firm without having to do much different.

How to Do Outbound Link Tracking for Your Website

Outbound links tracking can actually be tougher than you might think when using software like Google Analytics.  It's surprising, but Google's own software doesn't analyze this aspect of your website automatically, and in fact, you'll need to know how to do a little bit of computer programming (or hire someone who does) to do outbound link tracking.

Google Analytics lets you do outbound link tracking with a category it calls “events.”  Essentially, you can program Google Analytics to track any particular events that you believe are interesting and worth tracking—for instance, any time somebody clicks on each individual outbound link.

If you don't know how to program and don't particularly want to learn, there is an alternative to finding a computer programmer.  There are several programs available online that can help you to do outbound links tracking with convenient graphical interfaces.  You can also search for “outbound link tracking code” to find up to date code to insert in your website to help Google Analytics do outbound links tracking.

Doing Outbound Link Tracking For Other Websites

One other use of outbound links tracking is checking the number of outbound links on the websites you're currently building inbound links from.  Why would this be important?  Well, if a website that you've had good results building links on suddenly has a very large number of additional outbound links, the value of your links there just diminished greatly.

You can use a wide variety of web tools to do this kind of outbound links tracking.  If you find that your link value has been diluted by excessive additional links, it's time to find some new sources of inbound links that have not yet become overpopulated with links from other search engine marketing professionals.

Analyzing Other Aspects of Outbound Links

Once you're doing outbound links tracking on your website, you can check a lot of different things.  You can learn, for instance, which link position on your website is the most likely to get clicks.  You can also learn more about the ways that people go through your website, and which information they're leaving your website to get.

If you want to keep visitors on your site longer, after doing outbound links tracking, you should consider including the information available from the biggest sites as part of your own website.  For example, if many visitors are clicking outbound links that go to legal forms, perhaps you should consider hosting the same legal forms on your own website in hopes of converting more clients as site visitors stay longer.  Remember, after someone has clicked away from your website, it's not very likely that they'll hit their browser's “back” button.

Over half of search engine optimization links used to be reciprocal links—that is, links that went two or three ways rather than just one way.  Today, that number is lower, because Google has decided to impose penalties on websites that rely too much on reciprocal link numbers.  In this guide, we'll take a quick paced look at some of the pros and cons of both reciprocal links and one way links, and help you create a linking strategy that incorporates the best of both worlds.

Reciprocal Link Pro: Easy to Start

One of the best things about reciprocal links is that you probably already know some people who can provide them.  With so many attorneys today starting blogs, as soon as you start a blog you can ask your blogging friends and colleagues for a reciprocal link agreement.  Usually, people who are your professional connections will agree to this kind of reciprocal links arrangement, and before you know it, you'll be getting some of their link authority as well as some of their blog traffic.

One Way Link Pro:  Available on Social Bookmarking Websites

One of the easiest ways to build one way links is to use social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit.  These websites let you build your own one way links.  If you want your link to get onto the front page automatically, you can even pay to have a link displayed as a sponsored link, but you can also try to get it to the front page just by having great, readable content.

Since social bookmarking websites are so big, they're an excellent source of one way link juice for just about any website.  A word of caution, though: if users on these sites think you're spamming, you could be banned.  Quality and variety is key.

Reciprocal Link Con: Google Algorithms for Stopping Overuse

Because it's so easy to exchange links on a one for one basis, Google found itself having to stop websites from getting too much search engine optimization potential just from reciprocal links.  A reciprocal link will only provide you with additional link juice if you don't have a pre-existing high percentage of reciprocal links on your site.

Because of this, no matter what, you can never rely on reciprocal links alone.  You will always have to combine your reciprocal link strategy with strategies for building one way links.

One Way Link Con: Google Algorithms for Stopping Abuse

Of course, one way links can be misused just as much as reciprocal links.  It just took Google a little longer to catch on to the ways one way linking was being abused.  In response to people purchasing large quantities of one way links, Google imposed penalties on websites that had signs of link buying.  For example, your website could incur a penalty if too many of your links displayed the same anchor text, or if too many links came from the same IP address.

While most of the time, Google's detection scheme only detects paid-for links, even links built with white hat techniques can generate false positives.  When you're building one way links, you have to be careful to use a wide variety.

Reciprocal Link Pro: Contextual Linking

Most of the places where an attorney will be able to put reciprocal links will be in places that are contextual—other law firm websites, law blogs, legal directories, and so on.  Because of this, your reciprocal link strategy will be more successful.  Google considers contextual links to be more valuable, and you will be rewarded for reciprocal links that are clearly a sign of esteem between colleagues rather than a paid-for link exchange.

One Way Link Pro: High Page Rank Links

While law firm websites and law blogs may be contextual, they also don't usually have a particularly high PageRank.  Because PageRank matters so much to Google when it tries to decide how much authority a particular link confers on your site, one way linking from these sites can get you a steep increase in search rankings.

For example, links that you receive from Facebook or Twitter aren't likely to be reciprocal links.  These links are very likely to give you a significant rankings boost.

Reciprocal Link Con: Cluttered Websites

If you use too many reciprocal links, odds are that your website will begin to look very cluttered—and the websites with your links will look the same.  Because this can be unattractive to website visitors, you may want to keep your reciprocal link numbers down to a manageable level.

If your website already looks cluttered from reciprocal links, you may want to consider reducing some of them.  Keep in mind that if you have an existing reciprocal link agreement, you should always notify the people linking to you before you remove their link.  Otherwise, you run the risk of violating the agreement.

One Way Link Con: Making It “Look Natural”

While it's easy enough to post to social bookmarking sites or social networks, the vast majority of the time it's quite clear that your one way link building efforts are being done by you, and you alone.  Reciprocal linking is more likely to convey existing relationships within the legal community and in your own city or region.  Trying to make your one way links look natural can be very difficult, and any attempt to “jump start” the appearance of a grassroots, viral marketing campaign is likely to be discovered for what it is.

Conclusions

The best strategies for building links involve using both reciprocal linking and one way linking.  Reciprocal linking makes sense when it comes from sources you know you can trust, and websites with a clear contextual relationship to your website.  One way linking is necessary to avoid the appearance of having too many reciprocal links and incurring penalties.  You should make sure that your one way links are located on websites with high PageRank numbers whenever possible.

Outbound links are everywhere online.  Until relatively recently, Google limited the number of outbound links that could pass on their link juice to new websites.  Today, that's no longer the case, but outbound linking has become so complicated that you may want to use an outbound link checker.  These tools can help you to check outbound links both on your own website and on the websites where you're considering starting link building campaigns.

How Do Outbound Links Affect Websites?

Whenever a website that is considered to have authority (given to it in Google's 0-10 numerical “PageRank” value) gives an outbound link to another website, some of its authority is conferred upon the website being linked.

Why does that matter?  Because when those outbound links are referring to your website, you'll receive a boost to your search engine rankings whenever Google indexes one of these links.  The higher the PageRank of a website is, the more authority you can get from being linked there.

Why Do Outbound Links Need to Be Checked?

If you're not already checking your links with an outbound link checker, you might want to give it a try.  Most software to check outbound links is available for free on the web—often you can use the tools right on a website rather than downloading a piece of outbound link checker software.

By checking on your own outbound links periodically, you can identify exactly which of your outbound links is getting the most traffic and which don't seem like they have been very useful for people using your website.  If you have an outbound link that the outbound link checker indicates is almost never used, you might want to remove it so that the remaining links on your page get more value from the links they are receiving.

You can also run basic outbound link checker programs on other websites.  While you won't be able to track hits to outbound links the same way that you can for your own site, you can verify that links are working.  You may want to use your outbound link checker to monitor the number of links that are on a given website, for reasons that we'll go into in just a minute.

Is There an Outbound Links Limit?

If you've heard vague rumors that after a certain number of links, they don't count, or that you'll get penalized by Google for having more than some amount of links, that's no longer quite true.  It is true that Google used to have, as part of its Webmaster Guidelines, a rule about having no more than 100 outbound links per page.  Some people first used outbound link checker tools to make sure they weren't exceeding this limit.

However, as many websites began to grow that thrived on having large quantities of new links (think social networking and social bookmarking websites), this limit quickly became very impractical—and more importantly, it became unrepresentative of the web.  If a website's link is spreading virally through social bookmarking websites, it should gain authority so that it's easier to search for.

However, that doesn't mean you get the same amount of link juice from your outbound links on these websites.  Now, the total amount of authority a website has to give must be divided among all the links it has.  This means that you won't get nearly as much link juice from a very link-heavy website as you would from a website with similar PageRank and only a few links.  Because of this, outbound link checker tools are still relevant even though there's no longer a hard limit.

Avoiding Link Dilution With an Outbound Link Checker

By running an outbound link checker periodically on the websites where you're working to build inbound links, you can verify that your links are still worth something.  If the links that you're building are very diluted, they may not be worth the time and effort that you're spending to make them (unless they're from a website with a very high PageRank score).

You can also use an outbound link checker to find out which new websites might be fertile ground to start building new links on.  By understanding how much link juice you're likely to get from each new link, you can start anticipating how much you'll rise in search rankings and how many additional links you need in order to reach your search engine optimization goals.

Monitoring Inbound and Outbound Link Traffic

If you want to keep a very close eye on your outbound links, you need something more than a basic outbound link checker.  If you want to be able to closely monitor where your traffic is coming from and where it's going, you'll need to start checking events using Google Analytics.  Event tracking can actually involve anything on your website, from clicking a link that goes to another page on your site to tracking visitors who stay longer than five minutes on a particular page.

However, this isn't for the faint hearted or the bad with computers.  You'll need some basic coding skills to get started on event tracking, in contrast to the very easy to use basic outbound link checker programs.  For some smaller firms, it's probably not worth it to pay someone to do this work—you may want to focus your search engine marketing efforts on other aspects of search engine optimization.

Analyzing Your Outbound Links

Once you start tracking where your links are heading and keeping track of how many you have with an outbound link checker, you'll be able to do some hardcore analysis.  Outbound link analysis can help you understand what your site visitors want and where they're going to get it.  

By looking at the traffic leaving your website through your links, you can develop a much more data driven understanding of what to include on your website and what to direct people offsite for.  While this kind of analysis can be somewhat difficult, many analytics agencies can help you interpret the results for a reasonable fee.

In surveys, small firm and solo practitioner attorneys frequently list marketing and advertising as their least favorite aspect of their job.  Unfortunately, in an increasingly competitive, linked in world, popularity matters more than ever, and link popularity (the number of websites linking to yours) matters more than just about any other kind.  If you have no idea how to build links yourself, you may be considering link popularity building services.  While a link popularity service may initially seem like a win-win division of labor, there are some drawbacks.  Keep reading this guide to find out both the advantages and the disadvantages of hiring link popularity services to do the dirty work of marketing for you.

Pro: Spend Less Time Working On Your Links

You didn't go to law school to build links.  Most attorneys would rather be doing just about anything else—even document review—than working on establishing links from a website.  A link popularity service can step in and take over all of those responsibilities for you.  Link popularity building services leave you with more time to talk to clients, research cases, and do all the other things that keep your firm running from day to day.

Link popularity services are generally so automated that you won't even need to think about your link popularity service on a daily basis.  Most link popularity building services will send you updates as frequently or as infrequently as you request, so that you can put your linking out of sight and out of mind.

Con: Lose Your Control Over Some Links

At the same time, having your links automated by link popularity building services takes away some of your control.  When you're building links yourself, you can personally choose which websites will host them.  When a link popularity service is doing the link building for you, you won't have that ability any more.

This aspect of using link popularity building services can be an especially big problem for established firms with a reputation to uphold.  You should always check link popularity services before you use them, and ask them what kinds of websites they post to.  If your link would be posted all over online pharmacy and pornography sites because you decided to use cheap link popularity building services, your firm is very likely to regret it.

Pro: Get Links on More Websites

Odds are, you only have a short list of websites that you know you could get a link on.  For most link popularity building services, the list is in the thousands and growing by the day.  A link popularity service can ensure that your links are displayed even on websites that you hadn't heard of before, and that are extremely valuable for contributing “link juice” to your own website.

Con: Google's Over Optimization Detectors

If your link popularity services link to too many websites all at once, it is quite probable that they will set off a chain of events you won't like very much.  First, Google will notice that you've posted links in an artificial pattern and will assume that you are using an automated link popularity service to artificially inflate your search rankings.  Next, they'll “sandbox” your site—this means that your links won't count, or will even penalize you, until you have them removed.  Not all link popularity building services are good at helping clients take links down, so you should find out about the policies of any link popularity service you use before this happens to you.

Pro: Professionals Know Which Links Work

One of the reasons that lawyers commonly give when they decide to use a link popularity service is that they want to leave link building up to the professionals.  Search engine optimization and link building is a rapidly changing world.  The most popular link popularity services are likely to have professionals researching the newest techniques, even if you as an attorney can only barely keep up with SEO blogs.

Having professional expertise at your fingertips is a great reason to hire a link popularity service, especially if you're not quite sure why your link building efforts haven't been working.  Link popularity services can analyze your current link traffic and help you understand what went wrong and how to fix it in the future.  Many link popularity building services will even give a free initial consultation so that you can get this information before making your decision.

Con: Professionals Have a Reason To Lie

On the flip side, remember that your link popularity service is a business, and because of that, it has a motivation to tell you that its methods work—even if they don't.  Let's say, for instance, that a new Google update renders the methods used by your link popularity building services completely irrelevant to search results.  If this happens, do you think the link popularity services company will tell you about it?  Instead, your link popularity service is likely to tell you to keep paying while it tries to work out a solution that may or may not work.

For this reason, if you decide to use link popularity services, you should check up on their work periodically.  Make sure that the links from your link popularity building services are still working, and that your link popularity service is actually leading to overall increases in your web traffic.  If you're not seeing changes to your rankings or your traffic, chances are that you've chosen link popularity services that just aren't working the way they're supposed to and you may need a new service provider.

Conclusions

In some ways, hiring link popularity services can actually be fairly risky for law firms.  However, for some firms, the unique benefits of having your firm rise in rank without having to dedicate hours of valuable time to it every day can be worthwhile.

You can improve the chances that you'll be satisfied with your link popularity services by seeking out services with good reviews and that don't fully automate link submissions.  Some link popularity building services will actually use exclusively hand-created links, which can be a much more effective way to do natural looking link building than full automation.

If you're using a lot of reciprocal links, you may need to know whether they'll start having a negative impact on your SERPs.  After Google's Penguin and Panda updates, 15 percent of websites were penalized for having excessive optimization—and one of the biggest red flags for over optimization is having too many reciprocal links.  In this guide, you'll learn how to avoid these penalties and how to overcome them if you've already been penalized.

What is a Reciprocal Link URL?

Any time you type a web address into your browser bar (like www.google.com), this is called a URL.  A reciprocal links URL is a URL that goes to a website that also links back to your own website.  Usually, reciprocal links are set up deliberately by people from two different websites in order to help improve visibility, publicity, and search engine rankings.

Sources for Reciprocal Links

In order to get reciprocal links, you don't have to look very far.  You probably already know friends, family members, colleagues, and relatives who have websites.  You can start getting your first reciprocal links URL by just asking one of them if they would be willing to do an even exchange of links.  After you get the reciprocal link URL from them and have verified that the link to your website is up, you can link to their site.

You can also find a reciprocal link URL and code to include on your website using some reciprocal link exchange programs.  These reciprocal link URL codes will actually work to automate the process of creating reciprocal links.  When someone includes the reciprocal link URL and code on their website and then follows the reciprocal linking instructions, your website will automatically create a reciprocal links URL that directs to their site.

How Google Penguin Checks Your Reciprocal Link URL

Google monitors your website's inbound links constantly to see whether your reciprocal links appear to be too high a percentage of your overall inbound links.  There's no exact percentage number (if your PageRank is higher, for instance, you can get away with having more reciprocal links URL content, while lower PageRank sites will get flagged with much less), but you should always keep these penalties in mind when making a new reciprocal links URL.

If you're not already working on building one way links in addition to your reciprocal links, you need to start right away.  If your website is already heavily imbalanced in favor of reciprocal links, you should focus on one way link building before including a single additional reciprocal link URL on your website.

Why Your Reciprocal Link URL Anchor Text Matters

In addition to monitoring your reciprocal links URL statistics, Google is also looking at your anchor text.  The reason that your reciprocal link URL anchor text matters is that Google wants to be able to identify trends and patterns.  If you're using the exact same reciprocal links URL anchor text in every single link that you create on a reciprocal basis, Google will see this as a very solid indicator that your links have been built artificially, possibly with black hat methods.

To keep your reciprocal links generating link juice for your website, you'll need to vary your reciprocal link URL anchor text.  By varying the reciprocal links URL anchor text even slightly, you'll show that your links haven't been made using a totally automated system.  Try to make the level of variation fairly high: for instance, some of your reciprocal link URL anchor text should be a brand related term like your firm name, while others should be the kinds of exact keyword matches that you might use for search engine optimization.

Checking a Reciprocal Link URL from Your Linking Partners

If you've already worked hard to build a great reciprocal links URL on a website, you don't want to let it just disappear.  It's critical to make sure that any reciprocal link URL you've agreed upon still exists as long as you're still running a reciprocal link for that website.

In order to check on your reciprocal links URL and make sure that your partners are doing exactly what they said they'd do, you can run a reciprocal link checker program.  This program examines every reciprocal link URL you've set up and verifies that the link to your website still exists on every website you're linking to from your reciprocal links page.

If you find that one of your linking partners is no longer listing your reciprocal links URL where they should be, don't just delete their link right away.  Sometimes links can disappear during site redesigns or during problems with a website.  Instead, talk to the webmaster about the problem.  Many webmasters will be more than willing to re-list your reciprocal link URL as long as they can see that your link is still intact.

What if You Have Too Many Reciprocal Links?

It's every web marketer's worst nightmare in 2012: waking up to a message from Google that says your website has been overoptimized, or has suspicious links.  If you have used too many reciprocal links, especially from non-contextual sources or sources that are blacklisted as being potential sources of link buying, you'll face these penalties.  When you get an email from Google about your reciprocal links URL content being bad, you'll need to act fast in order to recover the lost search rankings.

First of all, find out which reciprocal link URL they believe to be from a bad source.  Then contact the webmaster who is running that website and ask for them to take your reciprocal links URL down.  If they do, you can notify Google that the offending link has been removed.  If not, you should keep all the documentation relating to your attempt to have it removed.  Google will take this documentation into account and may decide to lift the penalty even if the link isn't removed, as long as you made a good faith effort.

Millions of links are being added to the internet every day in 2012.  If you're looking to build links so that you can improve your search engine rankings, you may have started to consider reciprocal link exchange.  Reciprocal links exchange is one of the oldest ways of doing link building on the web, and can be done by just about anyone with even basic knowledge of internet issues.  If you're curious about the details of reciprocal link exchange and whether it would benefit your search engine marketing, keep reading this guide.

What are Reciprocal Links?

When a link is one way, Site A gives Site B a link on their website.  But when a link is reciprocal, Site B also gives a link back to Site A.  Why would two websites do this?  The answer is simple.  Every new inbound link that you receive makes it so that Google perceives your website as having more authority.  Therefore, every time you do a reciprocal links exchange, both websites that are linked will generally gain in the rankings.

Reciprocal link exchange in some form or another has been part of the web from its very beginning.  Even if you're just linking to a friend's website and they link yours back, you've done a basic form of reciprocal links exchange.  Of course, as technology has improved and become more sophisticated, the form that a reciprocal link exchange takes has changed as well.

How Does a Reciprocal Link Exchange Work?

The idea of a reciprocal links exchange has come a long way from friends swapping links in the mid-1990s.  Today, reciprocal link exchange is often done on a large scale, and has become big business.  A large number of websites are now devoted to creating a reciprocal links exchange for any websites that want to submit their URL to their directory.  Some of these reciprocal link exchange programs are completely free, while others cost money to join.

When you join a reciprocal links exchange, you'll give your URL, and in exchange, you'll have to host some other URLs on your own website.  Some of the reciprocal link exchange programs today actually do three way reciprocal links (in which Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links back to Site A) in order to obscure the fact that they are exchanging links.

Why Are Search Engines Suspicious About Reciprocal Link Exchange?

In the early part of the 2000s, it was very common for websites to try to build their search engine rankings through overuse and outright abuse of reciprocal links exchange.  Because of this, Google and other search engines have been working to discourage people from using too many reciprocal link exchange resources.

The problem that search engines were having with reciprocal links was that when companies got automated reciprocal links a hundred or a thousand at a time, these links were often to websites that had no relation to theirs.  It made it more difficult to navigate the web, and made it so that junk and spam websites were able to gain in the search rankings even ahead of legitimate businesses.  Since as a law firm your business is professional, you should actually be glad about these changes—you don't want a spammer to be able to exceed your rankings by using reciprocal links exchange too heavily.

What Websites Would My Reciprocal Links Be On?

Depending on what kind of reciprocal link exchange you're using, there are several different answers to this question.  Today, some reciprocal link exchanges are set up to allow webmasters to look through websites in particular categories that are hunting for reciprocal links.  If you see a website that is in a contextually relevant category for you, you can do a reciprocal links exchange with that website.

Other reciprocal link exchange websites don't allow people to be quite as picky.  You may be able to choose a basic category on which to get your reciprocal links, or you may just find a reciprocal links exchange site that automates the entire process.  Keep in mind if you use one of these latter types of reciprocal link exchange, you have less control over where your links are and what your reputation online becomes.

Are There Disadvantages to Reciprocal Link Exchange?

There are actually several different reasons that you might want to avoid reciprocal links exchange, at least as a primary link building method.  While it's fine to build some of your links using a reciprocal link exchange, Google actually penalizes websites that have a percentage of reciprocal links that is judged to be too high.

It's worth noting that no one knows exactly what that percentage is, or what other variables may be able to affect it.  Having most of your links come from a reciprocal links exchange resource will probably negatively impact your website, but there are no guarantees.

The other reason that you may want to avoid a reciprocal link exchange is that it can make your website look spammy.  If you don't want the appearance of link-grubbing on your professional website, you should try to get one way links instead of building reciprocal ones.

Fixing Overoptimization Penalties

If Google does say that your website has been over optimized (your webmaster will get an email), you may want to take your links off of some reciprocal link exchanges.  Remove the link from your own website and notify the webmaster of the reciprocating website that the link has been removed.  

This will generally lead them to stop listing the link on their website.  You may need to specifically request this removal if it isn't done within a few days or weeks.  If the link is now one way, you may not actually need to have it removed unless you really want to—so ask yourself whether you believe the link would be providing value as a one way link before deciding to email for a deletion.

One of the most common ways for businesses to get reciprocal links is through a reciprocal links directory.  If you're not already using a reciprocal links directory, though, you may have a lot of questions.  You may have heard (and rightly so) that Google can penalize websites that use too many reciprocal links, and you may wonder whether a reciprocal links directory would actually hurt your site's search engine optimization.  We'll talk about all that and more in this guide.

What Is a Reciprocal Link Directory?

Let's just start with the basics.  A reciprocal links directory includes a large number of reciprocal, or two way, links.  By putting them into directory form, they become easier for people to search through in order to build additional links.

Sometimes, a reciprocal link directory will be oriented toward just one category of product or service.  Other times, they will take anyone with a website, and may or may not organize websites into categories and subcategories.  When someone sees a link that they want to reciprocate on the reciprocal links directory, they can create the reciprocal link with some degree of automation.

What Are the Advantages of Reciprocal Links?

Reciprocal links, whether or not you use a reciprocal links directory, can offer some key advantages that make them very attractive to some law firm marketing pros.  For one thing, it can be very easy to start your reciprocal link building efforts.  By using a reciprocal link directory, you can ensure that your link is used by a number of other websites very quickly.

That link number is important, because your inbound links matter a great deal to search engine rankings.  The biggest reason that businesses start using a reciprocal link directory is that they want improved SERPs.  Especially if the links from your reciprocal links directory are contextual or have a high Google PageRank, they will add a great deal of link juice to your website and improve your rankings.

Another advantage of reciprocal links is that they connect you with other parts of the web.  In order to take advantage of this, you shouldn't just use a very generic reciprocal link directory.  If you use any kind of reciprocal links directory, it needs to be very firmly based in the context of your website.  Building contextual reciprocal links won't just make your website easier to find in search engines, it will make your website part of a larger community.

When your website is included in a reciprocal link directory that actually takes your area of practice into account, you'll fare much better.  This type of reciprocal link directory can help you build connections with other attorneys.  If you're being listed in a reciprocal links directory, for example, other attorneys who work in the same practice area but in different geographic locations might want to list your link.

What Are the Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links?

Because it's easy to get an almost unlimited quantity of reciprocal links by using a reciprocal links directory, Google will start to have problems with your website if you overuse these websites.  Google keeps track of how many of your links are reciprocal, and can penalize you if this percentage grows too high.

The reason that Google does this is that too many unethical webmasters used to build huge quantities of non-contextual reciprocal links.  You can help to mitigate this disadvantage of using a reciprocal links directory just by making sure that every link you build is in some way related to your law firm.

Reciprocal links are also somewhat problematic because unless you're checking up on them routinely, you don't know for certain whether someone has removed your link.  In order to put your mind at ease, you can run a reciprocal link checker program that will verify that all of your reciprocal links are still in order.

Problems with Using a Reciprocal Link Directory

If you're going to build reciprocal links, you don't necessarily need to use a reciprocal link directory.  In fact, there are several reasons that you might not want to.  For one thing, using this kind of directory can look unnatural.  Anyone can see which websites have been listed there, and with Google's longstanding animosity toward artificial link building, it may be only a matter of time before people using these services are penalized.

Another problem with a reciprocal link directory is that you may have a tough time finding really contextual reciprocal links to build.  Because not all law firms are yet using reciprocal link building as a technique, it can be quite difficult to find the right kind of attorney to swap links with.

Keeping Your One Way Link Count Up

Since you'll want to preserve your search engine rankings by making sure that you have a steady supply of one way links coming in, you should also work on these link building strategies in tandem with your use of a reciprocal links directory.

However, especially if you're already using a reciprocal link directory, you should not use any type of automation for creating one way links.  When Google identifies a website that is clearly using automation and link creation websites rather than building natural links by having great content, it penalizes it.  You won't be able to fool Google—at least, not in the long term—so even if your strategy works for now, it will probably be discovered and you'll lose huge amounts of web traffic.

Instead, decide on one type of link to automate.  If you're already automating with a reciprocal links directory, do your work the old fashioned way with one way link building.  Create profiles for law firm directories and attorney review websites, make the most of any social networks you use, and keep every one way link you build contextual and natural.  This will ensure that you're much less likely to be penalized—and if you are, you'll only have to clean up your reciprocal links, rather than every link you've built.

With the vast majority of law firms—over 90 percent—using LinkedIn or other social media, you may be looking for new ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.  Link building is still the foundation of great search engine optimization, and reciprocal or two-way linking has a long internet history.  Today, some reciprocal links manager software can help you to automate the process of linking.  The question is: do you really need a reciprocal link manager?  Keep reading this guide to find out surprising facts about why a reciprocal links manager may not be the one size fits all solution it seems like.

What Is a Reciprocal Link Manager?

A reciprocal links manager is a piece of software that in some way lets you view, edit, and create reciprocal links.  Depending on the kind of program you use as a reciprocal link manager, you might use the program to fully automate link creation.

Some reciprocal links manager software works to check your existing links.  It's always possible that a reciprocal link that was valid a few months ago has since been taken down by your linking partner.  By running a reciprocal link manager of this type, you can make sure that you're not providing one way links to people who aren't considerate enough to notify you that they have removed your link.

A great many of these programs allow you to post a snippet of code in your website.  Once this snippet of code is posted, people can copy it and make a link to your website.  By following the directions on your website, they can notify the reciprocal links manager program and it will automatically check their URL for your link.  If the URL is valid and contains the link that was promised, your reciprocal link manager will immediately and automatically create the link on your website.

Why Would I Automate Links with a Reciprocal Link Manager?

Trying to get reciprocal links on your own can be difficult.  Talking to another webmaster, discussing the arrangement, verifying that the other webmaster has actually put your link on their website, and then linking to their website can take a long time to build just a single reciprocal link.  Automating this process with a reciprocal links manager can make it much less of a hassle.

This process also lets you build reciprocal links faster.  However, you should know that if you use your reciprocal links manager to build links too quickly, you may be penalized for using too many artificial optimization techniques.

Another reason for using a reciprocal link manager program is so that you can keep an eye on all the reciprocal links you've built.  While building reciprocal links by hand, without using a reciprocal links manager, is certainly more natural looking, it also makes it more difficult to notice when a link has been removed or a site redesign has changed a URL.

How Do Reciprocal Link Manager Programs Differ?

If you're looking for a complete automation solution, not all reciprocal links manager programs will work.  Some of these programs are primarily designed to monitor and verify links, rather than to automate actual link production.  You should find a reciprocal links manager program that specializes in generating reciprocal links if this is what you are hoping to do.

You should also try to find a reciprocal link manager that allows you to have a fairly high amount of control over where you put your links.  If you're allowing just anyone to link to you as long as they put in the correct code, you could end up giving reciprocal links to websites you or potential clients might find distasteful or scandalous.

Ideally, you want to find a reciprocal links manager that works in a way that looks very natural.  When your links have a natural appearance, they'll be ranked better by Google.

Are There Reasons Not to Automate?

Participating in link exchange programs can actually hurt your website if you overuse them, and reciprocal link manager programs can hurt in the same way.  This is because Google doesn't want any webmaster to rely too much on a single technique for building links—it looks unnatural and is usually an indication of a “black hat” technique being used, like purchasing the links that you're receiving.

If your percentage of reciprocal links is higher than your percentage of one way links, you could also incur penalties.  Any time that you use an automated reciprocal links manager program, you need to also focus on building your one way links with social networks, social bookmarking websites, and local profiles online.

Getting Reciprocal Links Without a Reciprocal Link Manager

There are other ways to get reciprocal links.  You don't need a reciprocal links manager program to talk to your friends and colleagues and start building natural reciprocal links.  One of the most common places where natural reciprocal linking occurs is in the blogosphere.  If you enjoy someone's blog and they enjoy yours, reciprocal links are often the natural result.

This type of reciprocal linking is very natural, and because of that, Google doesn't penalize it.  When you're reciprocal linking with other blogs, especially those related to your own blog's topics, it's much more likely to be considered kosher than if you had used reciprocal linking to blogs about completely unrelated issues.

Reciprocal link building is also possible if you are in some way affiliated with an attorney who works at another law firm.  Perhaps your firm often refers clients to another firm, and they refer to you.  You can further cement this relationship by adding reciprocal links to your websites.

Alternatives for Link Building

Of course, because you can't have all reciprocal links, even if you use a reciprocal links generator program you're going to need some one way link building resources.  Lawfirms.laws.com has a number of articles dedicated to helping law firm marketing professionals understand the latest one way link building techniques.  If you're unsure of how to get started in one way link building, you don't even need to leave this website to find up to date tips and tricks.

Contextual Link Building: A Link Building Solution For Law Firms

As linking strategies have changed and become more complex, contextual link building has become one of the biggest trends of 2012.  Law firms, because their business is so context-dependent, are ideal users of contextual link building strategies.  Whether you want advice on finding a great contextual link building service or doing it yourself, keep reading this guide to find out exactly how to make your contextual linking dreams become a reality.

What is Contextual Link Building?

Traditional link building just refers to the process of getting other websites to link to yours.  Search engines, when trying to determine what website is the best source for a particular search string, consider these “backlinks” to be one of the biggest indicators of quality.  This means that if no one (or almost no one) is linking your website, you probably won't appear in the first few pages of search results—no matter how carefully you've search engine optimized your website's actual content.

Contextual link building is a particular form of link building that involves only building links to websites that share many similarities with your own site.  Why does this kind of link building work?  There are several reasons.  First of all, in order to combat the rise of backlink spam, many search engines now take context into consideration when deciding which links are “worth” more to the ranking algorithms.

Second, contextual link building is more likely to be seen as relevant by users.  This means that you're more likely to have your links shared by other people online.  Typically, a contextual link building service will advise having two or three links in a 250 to 500 word post, all of which link to keywords you're attempting to optimize.

Can My Firm Do Contextual Link Building On Its Own?

It's very possible to do this type of link building without hiring a contextual link building service.  You can build contextual links on many different types of websites.  Let's take reddit.com, which has been soaring in popularity throughout 2012 and looks to do the same in 2013, as an example.  Reddit allows anyone to post links to content, and users of the website can vote a link up if they decide it is high-quality, and down if it is low quality.  A contextual link building service may or may not post on websites like Reddit, but you can.

When you post to a website like Reddit or any other “Web 2.0” site as part of a contextual link building effort, you'll want to decide what your goals are ahead of time.  Try making the kind of post advised by a typical contextual link building service: 250-500 words (trying to keep on the shorter end—people prefer shorter, more concise content!), with two or three links to your website.

Is a Contextual Link Building Service Worth It?

If you're having trouble finding places to do your contextual link building, you may want to hire a service to handle it for you.  A contextual link building service will find the best websites to put your content on—websites that already have a similar context to your own site and will give you the best quality backlinks possible.

There are a few reasons that you may want to avoid doing contextual link building on your own.  If you don't have much SEO experience to begin with, it's probably true that even a mediocre contextual link building service will do a better job than you will—there's simply too much to learn for an amateur to become good at link building within days or weeks.

Contextual link building can also be tough because it involves knowing exactly the right kinds of websites and keeping up with the most up to date SEO trends.  Hiring a contextual link building service means that you'll never need to worry about reading search engine marketing blogs to keep up—they'll do it for you.

While every contextual link building service is different, in terms of both experience and price, ideally you shouldn't choose a service based on price points alone.  A cheap service may give you great results, or it might be using outdated contextual link building methods.  Ask to see not only case studies, but recent case studies from your contextual link building service so that you can be sure that your service is doing the kinds of link building you want.

What is Tiered Contextual Link Building?

While traditional contextual link building works fairly well to improve search results, there are ways to improve upon it.  For example, tiered link building is substantially more complex, but offers benefits for law firms.  Tiered contextual link building requires not just building a back link to your own website, but also building additional backlinks that link to the backlink.

Why does this work?  Because Google and other search engines are much more likely to believe that a contextual link occurred naturally when other websites are linking to it.  When not only your content, but your links and tiered backlinks are high quality, you'll shoot to the top of search engine rankings.

Having a two-tiered contextual link building effort is great, but if you hire an experienced enough contextual link building service they may actually advise you to do three or even four tiered link building.  This may seem like overkill, but some services have had great luck with this type of multi-tiered system.

Why Not Other Link Building Methods?

Because contextual link building can seem like such a challenge, you may be asking if there's a better way.  The answer—perhaps unfortunately for some law firms—is no.  Contextual link building offers unparalleled ability to control the message and keywords that your backlinks are using.  If it's done right, it will look completely natural, and like part of traditional web marketing efforts rather than straight-up search engine optimization. 

Other link building methods are often very obvious and are much easier for search engines not only to track, but also to shut down if too many websites begin using them.  Contextual link building, on the other hand, is here to stay—it's simply too hard to detect when it's done well.