4. Abuse Usage of Reciprocal Link Exhanges (RLE)

In general there is nothing to say against link exchanges, as long as it is not done for the sole purpose of cheating the search engine spiders for better ranking. A honest exchange of links in between two sites, because their webmasters feel each other´s content to be a good supplement to their content is nothing to feel ashame or worried about. Therefore Google obviously has decided not to totally ignore link exchanges for a better ranking. But their overall value has been decreased, they are not weighed as heavily as before after the Jagger Update. Some reciprocal links or so called cross link exchanges have been detected as black hat SEO and are now totally neglected or even rated as link spamming. These are known sites created for the sole purpose of exchanging links as well as many FFAs (Free For All Link Lists), link farms, link selling or link renting and so on.

Solution:
Keep away or at least be very careful about exchanging links with suspicious FFAs, link farms or link exchange sites. They may more likely hurt you, than bringing any benefit to your website ranking. Stop or decrease your RLE link building strategy. Try to build one way linking through partnership programs, web and niche directories, relevant category listings and relevant industry portal registrations. Also to write your own articles with a link to your website within them and submitting these articles to above mentioned free article directories can be of great help for link building. Every time your article is picked up and distributed by another webmaster, they will include the link to your site within it. Allf for free and without you to have to link back. Make sure to write useful high quality articles without spelling mistakes, in order to have them republished more frequently. Also allow the other webmasters to modify your content as long as they leave your link active, in order to avoid duplicate content filters of the search engines.