Let’s start by considering why reciprocal links got a bad reputation. Way back before Google’s algorithm became so sophisticated, it only considered a site’s incoming links from other sites in rating quality and relevance. A link to another site was a vote for that site. When SEOs and site owners realized that they could simply trade votes with reciprocal links and improve each other’s standing in the SERPs, reciprocal links became very common. Not long after that, such links began to be abused. Link farms started cropping up. Some black hat SEOs even built three-way link schemes to hide t…