A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Emil and David have websites. If Emil's website links to David's website, and David's website links to Emil's website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites became an important part of the search engine optimization process thanks to the link popularity algorithm PageRank employed by Google, which ranks websites for relevancy dependent on the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link.

A hyperlink, is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on a (different) website.