The amount of link exchanging and link buying/selling going on at DP is enormous. Whilst I believe some do this in full knowledge that much of it is agains Google's guidelines, I can't help thinking that many are not aware. From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356 When will people finally realise that they need to place their efforts on creating useful websites rather than just doing crappy link exchanges?
So how does Google "legislate" against, for instance, a quality automobile themed site naturally discovering another related auto site that may be of interest, relevance and benefit to an audience and that "target" site naturally linking back at some stage for the same reasons? That might be seen as reciprocal linking or link exchanging right? Yet isn't that what Google is encouraging and if the links seem to eventually be reciprocal then it fulfills the same purpose, right? Damned if you do and damned if you don't by the look of things. As for the poor quality crappy link exchanges and public trading I say to them keep going. I hope Google continues to attempt to filter out the crap and let the rest of us succeed in our efforts. I would hope that the valueless blogs of cut & paste garbage become so utterly worthless in the search arena that those who beaver away at them realise how fruitless poor quality really is.
This has been a long debate among the webmasters to do link exchange or not to do But,infact its the fastest way to build links..But Google is more cleverer than anyone thinks in weeding out these crappy sites linking to each other!
Google's main message is to create quality content that should be useful for visitors and link to quality and relevant sites only. If you have a site about "Religion" and has a good content in there and there is another "Religious" site which you think can be useful for people who come to your site then you can give that site a link... but you should not go to that site and ask for link exchange. This is what I learned from the quote you shared
yeh google can even detect 3 way linking now aswell 2 way links are no good unless its just for traffic purposes when im building links i always look for in content links to keep them looking as natural as possible
Hey dude. Long time no see. First, a majority of the people do not have the common sense to research this subject. Some just want the 'quick and easy' method without doing any real work, and ignore good advice altogether. And some perpetuate the problem by endorsing bad linking, and gets the ball rolling back up the hill again. You used the words 'crappy link exchanges'. As opposed to, what, good link exchanges. I think there is still value in a link exchange page (not pages and pages of them). The word 'excessive' was added to the terminology of the guidelines last September. Google does acknowledge, now, a need for such pages. The trick is how do they determine 'excessive'. My rule of thumb is never link out to sites that use automated link exchange systems ... period. Quite some time ago, I chopped out a ton of link exchange pages and revised my .htaccess file to show those pages as being permanently deleted. Now I have a single page with about 20 links to quality web sites. About half of those links were not 'exchanges' and were informational (authority) websites -- you are what you link to IMO. Matt Cutts even said (if I can find the link again) that there is nothing wrong with link exchanges if done in moderation. I think as long as the links are to good websites that do not employ large scale link reciprocation, you will be fine.
Great thing to point out! Link exchanges are not ILLEGAL, they have ALWAYS been a part of the web and are NATURAL when relevant and in moderation. It's not hard for the Big G to figure out your links page with 300 links to 300 other sites that are unrelated to your topic but all link back to you is UNNATURAL. But if you have a baseball website and link to 20 other sites about baseball, that's NATURAL and perhaps even USEFUL to your site visitors.
As Dodger points out, I also get the impression Google rank pages that offer a 'click-through' path on keywords and don't bother ranking 'dead end' pages. If they offer a dead-end page the 'search' ends, if a surfer didn't find anything there, they reckon Google failed, and after four time they go to Yahoo. So why would Google risk 'dead end' pages (due to a high pagerank) showing up first in searches ? I can imagine Google prefering urls with a path through it.
Unfortunately, the world isn't fair. I think the Internet (and our pockets) would be far better off if everyone did just this. They don't realize they are fueling a fire and that things will just get harder and harder and harder for everyone - including themselves. There was a time when you could put up a single web site, design it well, put a lot of effort into it, and traffic would flow quickly and steadily and so would the income. Now, you have people running 2,000+ spammy websites, taking even more effort than running a single quality site and offering nothing good to the Internet community all in an attempt to capture a small percentage of the money that was once available. Keep it up and in another few years you can expect to have to manage 10,000+ spammy websites to make a small fraction of the small fraction of income you would have once made if you didn't contribute to the overall degradation of the Internet. I shake my head sometimes. The poor excuse for some looking for a quick buck always ruin everything for the rest.
If you link to your SEO site in your sig here, never ever link to here from your blog... Actually, not all link exchanges are bad, and if Google truly thought so, then they would not be linking to other sites themselves. If I like your site, I'll link to it, blog about it, and otherwise talk about. I would most certainly hope that you would do the same for me. I think that bad part falls under things like directories that require a link back, or link farms that specialize in swapping links.