Member Avatar for HelenLF

Hi,

I am new to SEO so my apologies if this question is overly simple.

One of my clients recieved a link request from a company who have websites A and B, both of which have a higher pagerank than my client's site. They want my client to link to A and will put a link to my client's site on B.

What I wondered was...
1. Is this seen by Google as ethical?
2. Would my client be penalised or would they benefit from this type of link?

Thanks in advance.

Helen

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Short answer: a three-way or reciprocal arrangement is risky unless every link is genuinely editorial and useful to visitors. Google treats manipulative link-exchange schemes as spam, so any swap done primarily to influence rankings can trigger algorithmic or manual action (see Google’s guidance on link schemes).

Practical checklist before agreeing to anything:

  • Confirm the exact page and anchor text they plan to use and verify the page is indexed (use site:theirdomain.com/thepage or cache:).
  • Inspect placement: editorial paragraph links are far more valuable than sidebar/footer/widget links or directory pages.
  • Assess site quality: thin content, lots of unrelated outgoing links, or obvious link-farming are red flags.
  • Check crawlability: ensure the page isn’t blocked by robots.txt, meta noindex, or hidden behind scripts that stop crawlers.
  • Ask for transparency: if it’s a quid-pro-quo, get the details in writing (URL, anchor, how long the link will stay) and consider requiring a clear disclosure if payment is involved.

Context from the thread: as and emphasized, relevance and editorial value matter more than PR numbers. ’s point that an arrangement where the linking sites aren’t tightly cross-linked reduces obvious manipulation is true — but it does not remove the need for quality checks.

If the linking site fails the checklist, decline and invest time in earning one-way editorial links instead (useful content, outreach, guest articles, partnerships). For official guidance and deeper reading, see Google’s link-schemes guidance and Moz’s beginner’s guide to link building: Link schemes — Google Search Central and Beginner’s Guide to Link Building — Moz.

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Member Avatar for canadafred

Hi,

I am new to SEO so my apologies if this question is overly simple.

One of my clients recieved a link request from a company who have websites A and B, both of which have a higher pagerank than my client's site. They want my client to link to A and will put a link to my client's site on B.

What I wondered was...
1. Is this seen by Google as ethical?
2. Would my client be penalised or would they benefit from this type of link?

Thanks in advance.

Helen

Tell your client to delete link requests.

Member Avatar for LeloPaul

I would not exchange links like this either. Google wouldn't approve, though they'd likely never find it. I wouldn't do it because I only link out to something that's relevant and helpful to a visitor. There are other ways to build your inbound links.

Member Avatar for HelenLF

Thanks for the replies. The other website owner's sites have content that is relevant to my client's site. Should I still give this a miss?
Are link exchanges a waste of time then? They seem to be recommended in a few of the seo books I have read, but they do seem to take up an inordinate amount of time. Any advice on a reliable reading source for seo would really be appreciated.

Member Avatar for Nichetraffic

Three way links used to be hot a couple of years ago when reciprocal linking seemed to lose it's SEO boost. But now what you want are one way links.
Having said that it the clients sites A and B are not linked to each other, then it's better than no link. Especially since they have a higher PR than you. Just make sure the link they give your site is do follow

Member Avatar for canadafred

Link exchange requests are from desperate people, desperate to make their garbage appear important to the search engines.

I'm not saying 100% of the time but most of the time the link beggar has a trick or two up his sleeve. He wants you to cleanly link to his crap but is hesitant to offer the same. There are many ways a link on his page could be worthless; he could have a nofollow attribute installed on the anchor, he could have a robot.txt exclusion for all his links pages, he could have removed it from a Google Sitemap and orphaned the page so that the SE would never find your link ...

Tell your client, whenever he gets solicited for a link exchange to delete it as if it were Junk mail.

Rest assured, there are some link exchanges that can have value but not usually these types and as far as I can tell, link exchanges are on the chopping block, even though the SEs still hint of its worth as a search engine manipulation technique.

Edited by canadafred because: spelink
Member Avatar for financialinsura

If you talk in terms of ethical, then i would say your client to not worry about it. As paid links are also not allowed and even many forums are having different sections and categories for it. So, don't bother and find out whether it is relevant to your website or not.

Member Avatar for esteroj

I received the same mail and believe me "don`t do it" the site that they are promoting is a well written and optimized, but the site where they will place yours is a very poor site.

Member Avatar for mokmok69

I like 3 way it is a strategic way to get oneway link to your site.

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