I was wondering whether Google counted reciprocal links the way same as one-way links. Considering of course that both my website and my reciprocal partner are both related.
yes they can tell the differance, and no its not counted the same. As for how much each link counts thats a bit unknown since that is not published for each link. Each link counts differently, some are worth more then others, and some may even hurt you rather then help. All told it does matter. Read some more here in this section and it will answer some more questions specifically. Also a great resource is Aaron Walls "SEO Book" He has changed things up a bit though. It costs like $100 and you get a membership for a month to an elite community and you get the seo book which is straight up awesome and will help you out tons. MAtt
of course google and other SE make the difference, as said before some links can even hurt you so be very careful, check if your link partners are still linking back to you, and if not you don't have any reason to link to them, it would only hurt your pagerank, it's better if everybody recommends you (by placing a link to your website), but if you link back to them it can damage your pagerank in a way. I read this in the seo book of aaron walls :=)
you bet they can and do tell the difference. I have seen a fairly wide array of opinions about the value of reciprocal links these days, but certainly everyone seems to agree they are not worth what they once may have been worth and the widespread use of the reciprocal linking likely brought about its demise or near demise. I tend to agree with those that say that one or two a year may be worth the effort. I tried an "experiment" about six weels ago. It was far from scientific so that is why I hesitate to call it an experiment. The result stemmed from sending out some 60 emails to reciprocal link partners that no longer had my link on their sites. Out of sixty, after six weeks two had responded. One told me it would take 6-8 weeks to get my link back up. Yikes, while the other simply said they would look into it. Do the math
I have 9 sites and they link to each other on the main pages. but I do it in such a way as they are not linking directly back. Instead it is like a link circle.
How can you link websites in a circle to where you don't have any reciprocal links. That doesn't seem to make sense.
I have no doubt Google is smart enough to tell the difference. It would be quite simple for them to index your links, your partner links, and then determine which ones are reciprocal.
It should be really easy for google to see that...use reciprocal linking wisely, if at all, and instead focus on strong inbound links from relevant web sites. Sean