I'm getting more and more info from people running test sides that sites with reciprocal links were affected the most. This starts to make sense for me too. At the other hand, inbound text links gained a lot. Is three way linking the future? Anyone ideas about that?
Even I feel that sites running reciprocal campaigns and having paid links are affected a lot. Three way linking can be a better option, but the weightage of the site from which we are linking back may be less in the sense that there wont be any in bound links to that.
In Jagger, my one site that has almost no one way links, just reciprocals was not affected at all and maintained its first page rankings. Some of my other sites that have no reciprocals at all, only one ways dropped off the map. I don't think the update had anything to do with recips or one way links, it looks like it was just some kind of mess up to me.
Can it be that when a site has a certain age that they were just put back and now have to climb up the ladder again? That's the case with my site Almost all of my main keywords are climbing back where they used to be before, in fact it happens at every google update to me after I started to have good rankings and it always gives me a break in traffic fo a while, this time the longest.
This has been popping up with every Google update since 2003. There has never been any evidence that Google is now, ever has, or ever intends to discount, devalue, or penalize reciprocal links for being reciprocal. There are numerous sites with reciprocal links that weren't affected in this or previous updates. Stop putting effort into worrying about and trying to arrange for various link schemes to hide reciprocal linking. Worry about arranging for relevant incoming and outgoing links and focus the rest of your efforts on content and other SEO factors.
I can't make head nor tail of what actually occured during Jagger. I think it was a mixture of a) a cock up, and b) attempting to clear spam sites from the index. There doesn't appear to be any common factor between sites that have been affected.
It's like anything - use it in moderation and you are OK. What kind of percentages would you see in the wild? Wouldn't a site with only reciprocal links and 0% of other links stand out like a sore thumb? I've got a site with less than 10% of links being reciprocal, it has done well in Jagger.
Probably. But there would be other warning signs about that site, I think. I find it hard to imagine a site with 100% reciprocal links, actually, unless it's one of those directories that demand reciprocal links that I immediately put on ignore.
True. We don't know what the cut-off point is, or indeed if they have various cut-off points based on various other factors (sector/age of site/PR), but I guess what I was trying to say was that mixing a small amount of reciprocal links with a large number of other "natural" looking links may be a good way to go.
Always try to get reciprocal link from higher PR. I mean, try to get link TO your site from a site having a PR of 7+ or so.
Better advice: "Try to be #1 for all relevant search terms for your site on all major search engines."