The link: command suddenly appears to be filtering out 95% of all reciprocal links. Is this the beginning of the end for reciprocal linking? Will three-way linking become hugely popular? I am curious to see how long this takes to be reflected in the SERPS -- if it ever is reflected in the SERPS. I wonder if it is already reflected in the SERPS and I never knew...
I am not seeing this. My backlinks are still showing reciprocals in the same ratio as any other links.
Ahh...I wondered when....that is if it is correct...but my gut feel would say that it should be. One thing I can tell you though is that I have fairly positive proof that the negative effect of forum signatures has shown on two of my sites. I removed the signature links totally four days ago and today two sites that should have been in the serps, but I could never get them there, suddenly appeared - still way down but they have appeared - that is jumped 100s of places.
That's interesting... When do you think this filtering was put in place Foxy? So there was a 4 day time gap between removing the sigs, and then reapearing in the SERP's... Hmmmm... Are those two sites completly seperate (other than the fact that they were both being linked from your sig)? I theory then, you could just put a competitors links in your sig, then watch them drop... That's not particularly good news...
A little while back - the timing showed up in the big experiment - but I sat on my sigs for a little while longer just to compare. The two sites are totaly separate and your theory is correct however the drop is counteracted by a spread of other ibls
The displayed links may be going up, but I wonder if the effect that they are having is going up also...
I have noticed the same thing. The link command use to be a great tool for finding high power linking partners. I think google has shaken things up and made it more difficult to find high PageRank linking partners.
In a word, no; in three, not at all. Reciprocal linking is incredibly common on blogs, which Google is giving incredible advantage to in regards to rank, time to spider, etc. Given this and the fact that they own a large blogging engine (Blogger) tells me that reciprocal linking is far from dead.
This is missing logic, why should google penalise people forparticipating in forums? They know more and thir sites on the subject should be better. Also the competitor issu. But I must agree with you that there is some problems with linking signatures. At one site of mine, two pages with the highest pagerank sucks for ther targeted terms. In fact their sucks terribly and do much worse then they should comparing with other pages in the site. These two pages are targeted with many forum links and all links contain the keyword. The keyword is one world only sometimes combined with another one or two worlds. This seems to support your theory, but perhaps the LOW DIVERSITY may be the factor. I will therefor restructure the anchor text of the IBLs to be much more variabble and also use the synonym of the targeted keyword and let you know how it works. Question: 1. Were your forum IBLs diversified as for their anchor text? 2. Have you been using the synonyms of the keyword? 3. How many links from a single forum (max). 4. IP diversity / how many forums. Thank you for your post, interesting!
One of the mistakes that people make is saying things like 'this has had a negative affect' it has in most cases not been a negative effect, it might have negatively affcted your rankings, but that was simply because Google has reduced the value of such links. So the link is not having a negative value, it is just not having as positive a value as before. Secondly it would probably not be just forums, it would IMO probably be aby domain with excessive links surrounded by the same text. Just my supposition though, no fact in it at all, just th gut, and what I would do if I were G.
In the normal world I would accept this......however we are in an abnormal world IMO. The site in question, just for the record, ranks highly in the inktomi [yahoo, msn] and also in the new msn to be is no1, but, more importantly, ranks higher in the SERPs with Google, inside the dmoz listing, as the Google directory! Now this is simply crazy - the logic does not follow that it be of such importance that it would "rate" within the directory structure of google and then that it would be listed higher than if it existed in its own right. You could argue PR but in fact this is not the case - there are others above both google directory and this site that are lesser PR and, as we know, PR has been devalued.
Thanks - I look forward to your "experiment" results. Answers: 1. No 2. No 3. Bucket loads and I mean buckets. 4. Approx 6 but two of major importance. As an aside there does seem a need to move the linking away from "menu", "nav", "sigs", "footers" etc where the links are side by side into text placement eg as in a blog but I haven't worked out the "importance" or the "detriment" yet. I do not think, as in my reply above that it is just a devaluing - G has gone beyond that
Oh and scisoft - welcome to the forum - glad to have you here - a very nice post with objective comments. BTW we have found that IP diversity improved the position of the "sleeping bags" very quickly and gave greater stability - but it was not over many IPs!