Does anyone think there is still value in using things like this? Sorry if I'm re-inventing the wheel. I'm sure there has been some discussion but I couldn't find it. I use Rl in a limited way, keeping links off my 'good sites' plus some sites not in the program at all. All my sites seem to have pretty much faired the same in the PR update (mostly down) but ranking pretty much good apart from one site (which I don't think I can tie to any RL problem). In my heart I think I have to stop using RL eventually but timing is everything. I'm guessing if not already, Google will soon class these links as 'paid'. Just wondered what you all thought and if any of you have experience of it?
Google says that "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging is a link scheme" http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
RL Is not reciprocal linking, as you dont link to the same sites that link to you. also if you build your points on sites that dont really matter you can use your points then to build inbound links to site that are good. i have some blogs in RL that give me some good amount of points, but use the points for turnkey sites and some ecommerce sites i own that are not in the network, so the site only have inbound links and no outbound links. all have gone up in PR exept one, but i think my problem with that site was a duplicate content issue. (it had 2 homepages) So i have got good experience for using RL, my only downside of the RL program is they put ads on pages that are not cached by google and you may have to wait a long time to get your backlink indexed.
imo recips arnt worth as much as they were, i have recip links relvant to my pages e.g. bmw z1 linked to z1 blog with a decent PR and i lost all my PR and have maybe 25 visitors aday, where a s i used to have 300 +
As mentioned above, I'm not talking about reciprocal links. What I am concerned with is that Google is getting quite good at identifying 'unatural' links, ie links that are grouped together in certain ways, same format across pages and I'm sure many other ways it can draw conclusions. What worries me is that there is absolutely no way Google can know if these are paid versus some part of a link scheme like Coop or RL. Thus if my site has some inbound links from various sites that Google thinks are 'selling' links, my site may be percieved as 'buying' links.
Depends how you look at it. Certain other link networks only allow Google cache to be the deciding factor. That can leave you sitting on a chair for a while. RL goes by MSN Yahoo and Google. It depends how you see it. I think somehow gayc is right though. Google does have the ability to zoom out and reverse engineer. H