How Much is a Reciprocal Link Worth?

This might sound like an odd question, but how much do you think a reciprocal link is worth?

Let me clarify what I mean first by stating what I DON'T mean. I don't mean, literaly, as in how much revenue a link has generated you, rather what it means to you in terms of increasing your PR on google, for example.

Now, the reason I ask is because I'm contemplating giving a task for my (younger, student) brother to do. That is, ask him to try and obtain reciprocal links to relevant pages on a site I'm building by sourcing appropriate websites, emailing them, etc.

I know this might sound silly, but I just don't know what to pay him and he wants to be sure I'm not ripping him off

I was thinking something along the lines of paying him 10-20p per reciprocal link?

I'd love to hear your thoughts....

Thanks in advance,

50p a link you should pay him is it's quality sites he get you links from as it's going to take him ages to research and then do the email and answer the reply plus add the link to the other site.. and you will be lucky if you get 1 in 10 to link back to you.

You could maybe set a ceiling of say 100 quality links to start with.. of course if he was getting you PR 6/10 and PR 7/10 sites linking back then you want to pay him £1 a link LOL

You know right know I have someone working with me that is making £32 a hour, I don't get anything like that myself.. must be giving these people to much LOL .. but then she is worth it

Agree with Clarke, getting reciprocal links is harder that you first think. If someone was to do this for one of my sites I would probably pay them by page rank (for the page you are getting the link from)

i.e 1-3 - 20p
4-5 - 50p
6 - £1
7 - £5
9-10 - a few hundred!

Best bet though is just to do a little research every day and attemt to swap links daily. For instance Ive added around 3/4 reciprocal links today for various sites.

p.s Clarke - Behave yourself with the young lady!

Yeah for a PR 8/10 site I had to pay £200 for a link.. but then it was Yahoo UK after all

As for behaving myself with the young lady.. first off she is older than me by a lot and second I have never meet her in real life.. isn't the Internet wonderful, it's the only thing on the planet where you can agree to give someone you have never meet and may never meet huge bundles of cash and think nothing of it By the way I would just like to say that female site workers (the ones that are house wife's more so) are the best you can get, they love working on the web and do the job without you having to check up on them.

p.s. if anyone wants to give me a £5 a link from Free UK Stuff (PR 7/10) just give me a shout.. only joking about that before I get ever free stuff site here asking for a link

Wouldn't be nice if merchants and networks listed on a 2nd level page, there top 100 affiliates...that would certainly help !


By having affiliate links on our site with the networks name within the url, like cj. qksv, tradedoubler or dgm..isn't that naturally increasing their link popularity and if so how can we work it more in our favour?

Wouldn't be nice if merchants and networks listed on a 2nd level page, there top 100 affiliates...that would certainly help !

Only if it was opt-in.

Some high earning affiliates might not want their site listed where other affiliates can see it.

How much is a reciprocal link worth?
I would say considerably more than £1 each.

Ask yourself if you had 100 new inward links how much would that be worth to me? if it were the first or second hundred linking to your site it would have a huge impact on traffic.

Next ask yourself how long it takes to get one link, I think if I worked full time for a whole week I would get 20 links max (I'm guessing, the best way to find out is to spend a day doing it, see now many you get), you can't just Spam web sites you have to check them out, write a personal email one that shows you've visited the site, remember the higher PR a site has, the more link X 'Spam' emails they get.

I think £20 per link is probably more like it. But ultimately you need to find out how many he can make in a day/week and make sure you're paying him enough to make it worth his while (I think it will be a shock!!).

I agree.. its not easy getting links to other sites.. people will just delete them.

I would say if it generates lots of traffic for you give him £5 (500 UVs).. if its a low 100-200 hits.. give him a £1

The biggest reason people I get reciprocal links is not becuase of the traffic that the link will generate by itself (which is usually not much at all), but for the boost that it will give the site on Google.

The best time to email websites for Reciprocal Link is at the end of the month when they got payed on time which is once in a full moon ; )

Been thinking about this.

Obviously the first few links to a site are worth more, as they will move you the greatest distance up the SE listings.

I estimate each of my inwards links are worth £1 - £2 per month.

There is a major inherent danger that hasn't been touched upon.

Because you are taking about reciprocal links, you have the giving away as well as the receiving.

Many companies will give you a link in exchange for one on their site. The problem lies in the fact that you invariably get excited by the Page Rank of a site, without looking at the PR of the page where the link is going to be. Often the "links" page is penalised for giving away a lot of it's PR in outbound links. Even worse, some sharks will keep the links page in isolation from the rest of the site, so they might say "we have a Page Rank of 7", but if their is no links to that page from the PR3 links page buried in the dungeon.......

We undertake a lot of work for clients in link building as part of overall traffic building strategies. More often than not when we get a link it's an inbound one that is not reciprocated and it's usually of good quality and an active link rather than just one to chalk up another notch on the link popularity belt.

The reason for that is because we are the 3rd party in the equation and there is normally 2 or 3 reasons and benefits to the link being given and we are very persistent. Our average "attempts" to get a link is well over 3 times before sites give a link and it takes a fair amount of co-ordination and follow up and a large amount of persuasion.

Is your brother up to the job ? Good links should be well rewarded. Offer him so much up front with a performance related bonus for links that deliver traffic.

Chose the link text, page, position and make it easy for the webmaster to include you. If you intend to reciprocate, do it first, tell them you have placed a link on your site already, if they click on the hyperlink in your e-mail it's a boost to your traffic figures anyway. That way even if they decline the link, if you do enough of them then you'll win some in the end.

Jim Banks
Web Diversity Limited
www.webdiversity.co.uk

Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this.

I'm still unsure on what to pay, that's if I decide to go with it or not.

In reply to the last post, the system would be automated, allowing for direct submission and the links would be updated via a simple validation system on the admin side.

At the end of the day, I