I was just wondering, say you currently have a link exchange with another site, then you changed the link on your site so that it has a "no follow" tag. Would this in essence create a one way link? or would search engines still recognise the link on your site and therefore still see the inbound link to your site as a reciprocal link? Also say you have had a link exchange with a site for over a year and therefore Google has seen the link as a reciprocal one, if it was then changed down the track would Google then view it as a one way link or would they realise that it was originally a reciprocal and therefore remain as that?
I know it sounds a weird question to ask but I run a topsite that 99% sites generally join for the traffic rather than the PR, and if it is traffic that they want then that is something that I could gain more of if they allowed me to "leverage" that PR to improve SERPs etc rather than having diluted PR distributed to un-SEOed sites. Plus more often than not my site is sending them loads and loads of visitors everyday in comparison to the one or two they are sending us back - it's definitely not a case of me wanting to exploit a genuine link exchange with sites that I have asked to have a link exchange with. Plus a lot of spam sites sign up to my topsite just to get PR and it is something that I think I'd like to stop them exploiting. So how would Google view reciprocal links if they had a no follow tag? Would they be viewed as one way links?
Google can definately figure out link exchange. Imagine 400 links out of 1000 are pointing to you and 400 links from your website are pointing back to the 400. Get what I mean? It is easy for them to check patterns even if you do three way linking.
Yes, I guess it's easy for them to recognize, but I thought you have a way to know beside checking for backward links on both sites By the way, what is no follow tag ?
nofollow tag = used in a link to instruct search engines not to follow the link The nofollow tag (in this case) is the OP's perceived solution to change his original linking policy in order to elevate his site's status in the search engines at his reciprocal link partners' expense.
You make it sound like I'm commiting a cardinal sin here... "link partner's expense".... they signed up to my site not the other way around, my site sends them 3 PR 4 links and the majority of these sites barely have AN inbound link, and like I said 95% of sites that join aren't doing it for the PR. Anyway I can't help but wonder even if there is a no follow tag surely Google can still tell that there is a link to a members site, because the crawler would see the link in the code - it just wouldn't follow it. So would the PR still be transferred and would the crawler then recognise that there is still a situation of reciprocal linking going on?
By using the nofollow tag, Google will simply stop following the link to its destination. The tag will also prevent PR transfer (from your site), plus the link thereafter would offer no off-site SEO positioning value (anchor text) for the destination site. One of the best things I could see it being used for is protection against linking to a "bad neighborhood" site and getting a penalty. This can happen where links are freely posted to a site by the public. In a "top sites" scenario it's probably best, though used in a directory where someone pays to get link credit for his/her site, the tag would define the directory as a rip-off. On a side note, I see Yahoo! still recognizing inbound links which use the nofollow attribute.
I do get a lot of sites that sign up with absolute garbage site title names just to get a relevant anchor text link. I don't know if this is a HUGE issue for my topsite generally but it is definitely something that could become an issue now that I think about, but that said, sites that don't deserve to be on my topsite are just deleted eventually anyway. I'd definitely never do anything like that - I'm still going to have a lot of links point off my site and will definitely honour actual link exchanges that I have opted into, I just wanted to try and turn the majority of my reciprocal links into one way links to leverage it to improve SERPs which in the end benefits my members more anyway. That's interesting - but I imagine they will probably conform with time to the "Google Standard". Thanks for all that information it was really useful, I appreciate it.