2. It's eating away at your time like a hungry hippo: Just take a look at the last time you went out looking for a link and got it. How long did it take you to find the right type of websites? Or the time it took to find ones that even have a links page, find the contact information for the websites you wanted to contact, create the email, send the email, respond to the email, place their link on your website, check that they reciprocated with you, email back and forth a few times more and so on. You could be looking at half an hour per reciprocal link established – maybe even longer.

And don't think you're cutting corners if you're using software. It might be quicker to find possible linking partners using software but it's a false economy as, to my knowledge, people are still cleverer than machines. If you go looking for reciprocal links using software you are far less likely to get a response so the whole process will probably take you as long in terms of time spent per link established.

3. You are spending more time on other people's websites: If you spend a lot of your time researching and creating reciprocal links you'd better make sure that your website is perfect. Remember, all that time you're spending developing reciprocal links could be spent adding new content to your website, sending out an up-to-date newsletter to your mailing list or even sitting down and writing out goals for your website.

4. You don't have a multimillion-dollar budget: Those geeks over at Google and other companies have millions of dollars to create the latest technology that can sniff out the merest whiff of impropriety when it comes to link swapping.

If they think something is suspect you might get penalized. At first you started to see sites that used the same phrase for their in-bound links get penalized. Then it was sites that engaged with link farms. Who knows what's next?

Ultimately you can bet your bottom dollar that the search engines will change their tack with reciprocal links and their importance. Some of them are already starting to look at the words that appear before and after each link to make sure it is on a relevant page and not just created as part of a reciprocal linking deal.

5. You are the weakest kink, goodbye: When push comes to shove this whole game of website marketing is about balance. Imagine you are a tightrope walker. Beneath you there is a huge vat of boiling hot lava. To help you across the rope from the podium of website launch to the podium of website success you get a balancing rod.

Spending too much time and effort on reciprocal link building is like having a large sack on one end of the rod. This sack has an elephant in it. The elephant is wearing boots – made from concrete. Get the picture?