Reciprocal Links vs Paid Directories

[Babbittman]

all... I would appreciate any comments on reciprocal links vs. one way paid directory inlinks... I'm hearing mixed messages about the value (or lack of) reciprocal links. In a most cases, the 10 or so recip links I use are showing up when I do a link search in Yahoo and the Google page rank from the linked page is reasonably high... thoughts?

[webmaster]

Reciprocal links have come under fire lately at Google (Read the incredibly long AA thread, or the 60 day penalty thread etc) at this point, unless you know what you are doing, I would steer clear of peer to peer reciprocal links.

In terms of paid directories, they are one way, so they will not hurt you - how much they help depends on the many factors of quality for the directory, traffic, trustrank, pagerank, how many links on your specific page the list goes on.

[Bigtoe]

So far, directories are working for me. Good one are hard to find. Stay away from the ones with dynamic pages.

[JackvanDamm]

I also preffer to work with directories, 1-way link is always better than reciprocal

[AmandaMay]

Having too many links from paid directories may get your site banned one day. 3-way linking is my choice though reciprocal linking is still working for me whatever they say about it

[Homesurfer]

Having too many links from paid directories may get your site banned one day. 3-way linking is my choice though reciprocal linking is still working for me whatever they say about it

Good directories are always going to be good directories, whether it costs money to be in them or whether it does not.

Three-way links are not invisible, no matter what you may think or how clever you are about setting them up.

Peer-to-peer links, especially in the real estate industry, are a risk and a gamble - and representatives from search engines have been telling folks not to do them for some time. Sure, they work. They may work for years to come. Out of all the agents using peer-to-peer links, only a small number got penalized this year in Google. I don't know what will happen next year.

[avonreal]

3-way linking is my choice though reciprocal

You ought to be carefull with those, search engines can detect them and someday they'll be treated as reciprical links if thats not the case already.

[Jade456]

There really isn't just ONE thing that you need to do. I think a mixed approach is best. As they say, "don't have all your eggs in one basket".

[MikeDammann]

I would only submit to directories after taking a closer look at them. When a web directory has a tendency to list a lot of low quality sites, accepts spammy titles, has a ton of sitewide links to questionable sites, I would stay far away from it.

[gibex]

Use good directories, and some reciprocals (on your niche), if you can get them.