{"id":25256,"date":"2019-01-29T08:28:34","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T16:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=25256"},"modified":"2025-12-18T08:52:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T13:52:36","slug":"reciprocal-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/reciprocal-links\/","title":{"rendered":"Reciprocal Links: Will They Hurt Your SEO? (A Study by Ahrefs)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cYou link to me, and I\u2019ll link to you.\u201d Good link building tactic, or bad? Let\u2019s find out. <\/div>\n

I must confess that I feel a certain attachment to reciprocal links (otherwise known as link exchanges). They were the first \u201cSEO hack\u201d that I ever applied in my career.<\/p>\n

Let me share that story real quick:<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, I was an EDM<\/a> DJ with a growing interest in SEO. I knew some SEO theory, but I had yet to put it into practice. To solve this, I launched my own website where I published a weekly selection of newly-released electronic dance music. It became a testing ground for my SEO abilities.<\/p>\n

The first website I ever launched was as embarrassing as it gets. No surprise it\u2019s no longer live.<\/p><\/div>\n

Long story short, I quickly realized that if I wanted Google to send relevant traffic my way, then I needed links from other websites. That\u2019s when I learned about reciprocal links.<\/p>\n

I found a few dozen similar blogs to mine and offered to exchange sitewide links with them. They agreed. The problem? Reciprocal links were<\/a> against Google\u2019s Webmaster Guidelines and still are<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it didn\u2019t take me long to figure out a workaround for this problem\u2026<\/p>\n

Instead of putting my outbound sidebar links directly on my site, I put them in an embedded iframe<\/a>. The result? My blogger friends could see that I was linking to them but Google was none the wiser.<\/p>\n

\"dj<\/p>\n

Please don\u2019t judge me for this trick. I was an SEO newbie and my moral compass wasn\u2019t well-tuned.<\/em><\/p>\n

Needless to say, I thought I was pretty smart. That was until my blog proceeded to get no organic search traffic for over a year.<\/p>\n

For transparency: <\/strong>I can\u2019t be 100% sure that my lack of organic traffic was the result of a penalty for attempting to trick Google. There\u2019s a chance that my blog just got sandboxed<\/a>. Still, that was the first and last time I tried to build backlinks via link exchanges. I haven\u2019t done it since.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, enough about me. Let\u2019s get to the study you came here for.<\/p>\n

\"Beginner's
New to link building? Check out our<\/div>
Beginner\u2019s guide to link building<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n

How common are reciprocal links on the web?<\/h2>\n

The best way to know if reciprocal links do more harm than good is with an experiment:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Create a bunch of websites<\/li>\n
  2. Build similar backlink profiles for them all<\/li>\n
  3. Wait until they start ranking in Google for some keywords<\/li>\n
  4. Build a particular number of reciprocal links to some of those websites. Leave a few of them intact as your control group. Observe what happens next.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen anyone carry out an experiment of this nature before. Hardly surprising, as doing so would be quite a labor and resource intensive process.<\/p>\n

    Further, here at Ahrefs, we don\u2019t run such experiments\u2014we only study data we already have at our disposal.<\/p>\n

    So that\u2019s what we did. We:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Took 140k websites with 10k+ visits\/month from Google (estimated by Ahrefs)<\/li>\n
    2. Checked for overlap between the sites to which they link and the sites that link to them<\/li>\n
    3. Plotted the results on a graph to visualize how common reciprocal links are<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Our thinking was simple: By studying how common reciprocal links are among websites getting consistent traffic from Google, we could get some clue as to the toxicity (or not) of such links.<\/p>\n

      Sidenote.<\/div> We only cross-checked \u201cdofollow\u201d outgoing links with \u201cdofollow\u201d incoming links. The resulting percentage was calculated this way: [# of reciprocal domains] \/ [# of domains to which the target links out].<\/div>\n

      Here are the results:<\/p>\n

      \"reciprocal<\/p>\n

      26.4% of the 140,592 domains in our sample have no reciprocal links. 73.6% do.<\/p>\n

      Furthermore, 27.4% of the sites we studied\u2014almost \u2153\u2014have at least a 15% overlap between the sites to which they link out and the sites that link to them.<\/p>\n

      Editor\u2019s Note<\/div>
      \n

      Are you curious as to what these stats look like for the Ahrefs blog<\/a>?<\/p>\n

      We did the math and found that 19.25%<\/strong> of the domains we link to also link to us.<\/p>\n<\/div>

      \"Joshua<\/div>
      Joshua Hardwick<\/div>
      Head of Content<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

      It would seem then that reciprocal links are a common byproduct of the web, so you probably shouldn\u2019t be afraid to link to sites already linking to you. The same applies when asking for links from sites to which you already link.<\/p>\n

      But here\u2019s the thing: This study doesn\u2019t<\/strong> actually prove that reciprocal linking is 100% safe to do. That\u2019s because it suffers from survivorship bias<\/a>.<\/p>\n

      In plain English, this means that because we only studied domains with search traffic, any penalized websites were likely excluded from the start.<\/p>\n

      So right now, the only thing we can say with certainty is this:<\/p>\n

      It\u2019s possible for some sites with relatively high amounts of reciprocal links to perform reasonably well in Google.<\/p>\n

      How common are reciprocal links in Google\u2019s top 10 search results?<\/h2>\n

      The previous study confirmed our assumption that having a certain percentage of reciprocal links is perfectly natural and won\u2019t necessarily lead to Google penalizing your website.<\/p>\n

      But how \u201cpowerful\u201d are reciprocal links?<\/p>\n

      This is an important question. It\u2019s easier to convince friends\u2014to whom you may have already linked in the past\u2014to link to you as opposed to complete strangers. For that reason, it would make sense for Google to value links from friends\u2019 websites less than those from others, right?<\/p>\n

      The best way to prove that is with an experiment:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Create a bunch of web pages with similar backlink profiles<\/li>\n
      2. Build reciprocal links to some of those pages. See what happens next.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        If you ever perform such an experiment, let us know.<\/p>\n

        For now, we decided to work with the data we already have and study the commonality of reciprocal links among the top 10 ranking pages in Google. We:<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Took a sample of ~10k non-branded search queries (with Keyword Difficulty<\/a> scores between 40 and 60)<\/li>\n
        2. Pulled top 10 ranking pages in Google for each of them<\/li>\n
        3. Looked for overlap between the sites linking to those pages (referring domains) and the sites to which the residing website links out<\/li>\n
        4. Plotted the results on a pie-chart<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Important:<\/strong> Once again, we only looked at \u201cdofollow\u201d links.<\/p>\n

          Sidenote.<\/div> Search results for keywords with low Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores tend to have a lack of incoming links. That\u2019s why we only picked keywords with a KD score between 40-60. If we didn\u2019t do this, there\u2019s a chance that the top-ranking pages wouldn\u2019t have enough links for us to perform research upon.<\/div>\n

          Here are the results:<\/p>\n

          \"reciprocal<\/p>\n

          43.7%\u2014almost half\u2014of the 112,440 top-ranking pages we studied have some reciprocal links.<\/p>\n

          This once again seems to indicate that reciprocal links are a natural byproduct of the web. 4-5 out of every top 10 organic Google rankings have some reciprocal links, on average.<\/p>\n

          Editor\u2019s Note<\/div>
          \n

          We were also curious to see some data for our own site. So here\u2019s what we did:<\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Took the top 10 pages on ahrefs.com<\/em> (by search traffic) from the Top Pages<\/strong> report in Site Explorer<\/a><\/li>\n
          2. Found the \u201cdofollow\u201d referring domains to each page<\/li>\n
          3. Looked at how many of those domains we link out to from anywhere on ahrefs.com<\/em><\/li>\n
          4. Calculated the percentage overlap between them<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            NOTE.<\/strong> We calculated percentage overlap by dividing the number of overlapping domains by the total number of \u201cdofollow\u201d referring domains to each page.<\/p>\n

            Here\u2019s what we found:<\/p>\n

            \"reciprocal<\/p>\n

            One page had no overlap, two pages had 0.01%-5% overlap, and seven pages had 5.01-100% overlap.<\/p>\n<\/div>

            \"Joshua<\/div>
            Joshua Hardwick<\/div>
            Head of Content<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

            However, note that studying the top-ranking pages says nothing about cause and effect (correlation \u2260 causation<\/a>). It may well be the case that these pages got to the top of Google thanks to some early reciprocal links from friends. Then, as a result of getting organic traffic and exposure, they went on to pick up more links from other websites.<\/p>\n

            On the other hand, these pages could be ranking in spite of their reciprocal links. There\u2019s no way of knowing for sure from the data we have.<\/p>\n

            Should you be building reciprocal links?<\/h2>\n

            The answer largely depends on your understanding of \u201cbuilding reciprocal links.\u201d<\/p>\n

            Exchanging sitewide links with other sites in your industry is unlikely to work. So confident am I (Yoda!?) that this is true, we didn\u2019t even perform any relevant research to attempt to prove otherwise. Heck, I don\u2019t even remember the last time I saw a half-decent website with a sitewide outgoing link, do you?<\/p>\n

            (Don\u2019t want to take my word for it? The fact that link exchanges violate Google\u2019s Webmaster Guidelines<\/a> should be proof enough that this is a bad idea.)<\/em><\/p>\n

            But when it comes to building relationships in your niche by generously linking out to relevant resources\u2014and subsequently ending up on the radars of site owners as a result of doing so, which may indirectly lead to links from them further down the line\u2014well, that\u2019s a good strategy in my eyes.<\/p>\n

            Most content publishers are in fact already doing that, whether consciously or not.<\/p>\n

            Finally, if you\u2019re actively sending \u201cwill you link to me if I link to you?\u201d outreach emails, then please stop. We get these every once in a while at Ahrefs and we hate<\/s> dislike them<\/strong>. We\u2019re betting other website owners do too, as they\u2019re quite disrespectful.<\/p>\n

            Read these two<\/a> guides<\/a> for more outreach advice. Or check out this video<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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            <\/div>\n

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