The sun seems to be setting on the world of reciprocal link exchange. Sites that major on that may have to switch to a new paradigm, or go down like the titanic.

The major search engines seem to frown at reciprocal link exchanges, and gradually it is becoming obvious that chasing reciprocal links for the purpose of enhancing search engine rankings is becoming a dying art.

It was pretty contrived while it lasted. You set up a link page, and dump links there. Some webmasters did not bother to categorize the links. On the same page, you will find viagra, mortgage finance, debt consolidation, travel agency, Chinese porcelain, psychics and all the work. Visitors hardly visit such link farms.

Reciprocal link exchanges, as practiced by most webmasters and link exchanges were attempts to artificially inflate link popularity. The interest of the visitor is hardly reckoned with in the transaction. What webmasters look for are Alexa rankings and Google Page Rank of the sites they want to exchange links with. They are ready to trade links with a non-English sites. They know nobody goes there, except search engine spiders. Some webmasters block out search engine spiders, so as to fool the engines to believe all they have are one way links.

Ultimately, human visitors determine the success or failure of a site and not search engine spiders. Humans deliver the most required response, be it placing an order, clicking through to your affiliate merchant site, subscribe to your newsletter or whatever. Search engine spiders don't do that. If you manage to trick yourself into top search engine rankings, your fifteen minutes of fame will not do much to your bottom line. You will get lots of visitors if you show up tops in Google (Coming out tops in MSN and Yahoo does not necessarily translate to a quantum leap in traffic). If your site does not hold visitors, more visitors makes not difference, the returns will be close to zero. Like a high street shop, if all your visitors are window shoppers, you will soon be out of business.

To make matters more interesting, search engines figure out how long visitors stay on your site. How do they figure this out? Simple: let's say you show up number two in Yahoo! for ezine marketing. A visitor clicks through to your site. Fifteen seconds later, the guy is back to the same Yahoo! results pages to check out number three site listed. Look at it this way; Yahoo! sends a visitor to your site, and the visitor is back in a jiffy. It means your site does not have the content he is looking for. Imagine the visitor comes back an hour later. It means the site was useful, but he still needs more. What if he does not come back? This means he has found what he is looking for. Effectively, your visitors are giving feedback to Yahoo! If this happens over and over again (15 seconds visits), this is an indictment on your site. It spells you don