Reciprocal Links NoFollow
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I am working on the SEO for a company that sells commercial construction materials and I am noticing that the vast majority of the older, authoritative construction related sites and directories require a reciprocal link to be linked to from their site.
1. If I create a reciprocating link, but nofollow/noindex that page, is that seen as blackhat? Will I see any benefit from this over a link passing page rank?
2. Will these reciprocating links hurt me, or are they worth the risk within a young portfolio? I am seeing well ranked sites listed such as justblinds.com, this would imply they reciprocated a link as well?
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I think reciprocal links to related industries can be perfectly natural. In some cases they can even be really helpful to your visitors. A perfect example is Pink Jeep Tours Sedona (I don't do SEO for them), they have a page for Local Area Info where they link to lots of different hotels, area attractions, etc. Almost ever one of those local attractions link right back to Pink Jeep Tours, and they are all followed links going both ways.
This all seems perfectly natural because they are helping their visitors find other fun things to do. In cases like these, I think the reciprocating links are very valuable because they are all closely related (by industry) and helping to increase each other's credibility.
Regarding your question about nofollow/no index. In my opinion, no that wouldn't be considered black hat at all. SEOMoz does it, for example, in Q & A profile pages for all the user's links, until they hit "Journeyman" level, when they remove one "no follow."
I think the no follow/no index is your own personal choice. Just keep in mind that Googlebot may decide to follow the links and/or index the page anyway. Search engines only view those as "suggestions."
Hope that's helpful and good luck.
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