Way, way back many centuries ago, not long after the Bible began, ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ owned their own websites (no, neither owned Apple.com!). Legend has it that one was an e-book on how to feed a few thousand people with nothing but a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, but they only ever had one customer (it was before split-testing).

Anyway, every Thurday, they would meet up for a chilled glass of Veuve Clicquot and discuss how well their websites were ranking on the search engines. It seemed that both were struggling to make progress but they had heard that swapping links to each others website would place both websites in better standing with ‘The Big G’ (no, not that one!) and the websites would both enjoy higher rankings.

Indeed, after a few weeks, both websites were performing much better, and so they also swapped links with their buddies, and soon enough, Adam, Eve, David, Abraham, Moses, Samson, Delilah and Tom Jones were all happily swapping links and dominating the search engines.

The problem though, was  that ‘The Big G’ was looking down on them and realised that the websites with unique, fresh, and valuable content were suffering in the rankings due to not being a part of a link exchange scheme. You could have the most valuable website on the internet, but these ‘lower-value’, websites would conquer all.

Something had to be done, and it was. All ‘straight’ link exchanges were devalued massively and a positive emphasis placed on ‘natural’ reciprocal (two-way) linking. So, in other words, Adam and Eve’s links to each others websites became worth very much less in the eyes of ‘The Big G’, and these links only passed ANY value if they were a very small percentage of a much larger link profile.

However, ‘The Big G’ also recognised that links between 2 websites that linked to each other over time as a result of qualifying their content were seen to be natural and non-engineered and were subsequently not considered to be a delberate attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. These links were considered to be ‘valid’ and would pass on ‘trust’ and ‘authority’.

So, to summarise… if you are a plumber in Birmingham, and you deliberately swap links with a plumber in Newcastle, then you can guarantee that those links are of minute value (at best), especially if all you have coming into your website are reciprocal links.

But if you are a plumber in Birmingham writing a blog post about the new plumbing technique devised by this new upstart Newcastle plumber, and, 5 weeks later, the Newcastle plumber, as a means of qualifying his content, recommends a blog post written by the Birmingham plumber, then that would probably be seen to be ‘natural’ and link value would be passed.

As usual, the boundaries aren’t defined, so the way to look at it is this… if Mr Google Quality Engineer visits both sites and manually checks the links, would they appear natural? If so, you have nothing to worry about.