Yes thats exactly why its there. I am an online casino affiliate myself and blackjack ballroom is one of my best converting casinos. Online casinos purchase advertising anywhere they can whether the site is related or not and they pay a lot of money for it. They cannot advertise on adwords, ysm, or adcenter so they go everywhere else. That proves nothing. I'm not saying that its not passing "link juice" or whatever you want to call it because it might be and it might not be. Online casinos have a lot of affiliates that have their links all over thousands of websites. They use a 301 redirect from those long affiliate links to their home page (after setting cookie of course) and that helps them get inbound links. Do a google search for link:blackjackballroom.com and there are 1380 results. If you see the links from w3schools in there then I guess that will answer your question.
They want natural linkings only. If two people agree to swap links purely to benefit PR, one is a pills site and one is furniture manufacturer then yeah these links are almost certainly going to come under their new rules and be either ignored or punished.
Hello... If im correct im thinking "matt" would consider PR7+ links to be the start of the something of true concern as the weight per PR is higher if not your just collecting a bunch of worthless emails from a bunch of ^$^$^ webmasters, though i must agree its not even relevant and shouldn't be thier UNLESS that site had a page that was relevant to subject matter.. Just 2 cents worth.. thx malcolm
You wont get punished for link exchanging with relevant sites, but you dont gain anything from it either I dont think, as google wont take them into account. Of course if they are relevant then you will gain from targetted traffic coming from it.
Why wouldnt you? Relavancy is what it is... apple + apple = Good Apple apple + apple PR+7-8-9 = Great Apple It stands to reason that if you do right you should reap the rewards from it.. thx malcolm
The site can put up whatever links it wants but at sometime in the future Goooogle might turn off the juice.
I don't think Google completely discounts reciprocal links - that would pretty much destroy their algorithm since the top few sites in any niche are extremely incestual as far as their linking goes. I bet they just look at a percentage as a total of your overall links and may apply a + or - filter to your rankings.
Thats a good point. Also I noticed on one site I built ages ago, I done a link exchange with a PR6 site and got another couple of small links elsewere (pr0-1), just checked the PR on my own site and its PR3 so I would assume they have taken the pr6 link exchange into consideration.