Mixed Signals on Reciprocal Linking

If you get links back from relevant especially higher page rank sites, that is not going to hurt you and will help. 

Agreed. Too many links do seem to hurt now, as search engines think something is fishy. However, if it's highly ranked.....AND pertains to your core business, the links seem to help. Good Luck to you!

I'm not the expert on this, but like you, I listen to my web guy and the people he puts me in touch with. They tell me YES it does help but it should be done with only good links whatever that means.

Patricia Aulson/  Portsmouth NH Real Estate

If you put a few links to affilliates in your area for the purpose of providing more valuable service to your clients then yes you should and if they link back all the better.

If you are creating a page full of links whose only purpose is to trade links with other people then no you should definately not.

Why? It is thought that for every outbound link they discount an inbound link. While thats not entirely true it sort of is and therefore there is no point to do this. Then you can run the risk of being found out and if so you could get in trouble since you are gaming the system.

If its legit and serves a legit purpose then do it. If its to trade links then dont ever do it.

There is no difference on the links for a very simple matter that everyone overlooks when they talk about links. Sure a link from a page rank 9 site to your site with shoot your page rank through the roof if it were the only outbound link from that site. Well a big site like that probably has about 8 -15 million outbound links so the PR is diluted and has about as much weight as a link from a PR 1 site that probably only has a few dozen outbound links. So again trying to see which ones would get you more juice is rather silly since its impossible to say which link is more valuable than the next.

And again this only strengthens what I was saying in the last comment that trying to create these linking schemes is going to get you nowhere at all. If google comes across a page with 100 outbound links and those links go to a site and I dont care how many sites are in between they are going to see this as trying to game the system and you are going to wish you never did it. They might not outright punish you but all of those links are just going to cancel each other out.

I had never heard that reciprocal links would hurt optimization.  Thanks for sharing!

Kevin,

Reciproate properly with other genuine home and real estate-related sites, and, if you are like the thousands of other agents doing it, it helps.

It's also well proven. Just look at real search results in highly competitive markets. Like Phoenix, Seattle, Scottsdale, Oragne County, SanDiego. Many of the top sites reciprocate. 

That input is based on ten years of reciprocation experience, not on SEO theories.....