A webmaster who wanted to exchange links says that Google have changed the algorithm. They give you brownie points for links to your site from sites when you do NOT link back. This will give you more Authority.....He was suggesting that he will link to one of my sites but I link back to an alternative site! In other words if you do have reciprocal links between 2 sites Google will differentiate against you! Any thoughts?
There are theories that recips don't count as much as one-ways. In my experience they still do count though. If it is an easy trade and it is with a related sites then I would go for it. If its with a Casino site or they make it very time consuming, you are better off spending your time elsewhere.
There seem to be more and more people believing in 3-way and more way link trades as the better alternatives to direct link trades between 2 sites. Keep in mind that link trades are not only when you initiate the trade but, also involve keeping the links in place by all parties involved. If you have many to keep up with, it may become important to have an automated means to track the status of the inbound links to your site(s) so you don't end up giving outbounds with no recips coming back. I'm not trying to sell a link tracker but, feel it is important to know the issues before beginning the process (when possible).
1. Since organic linking will inevitably also produce a substantial number of reciprocal links, the likeihood of Google ever penalizing them seems extremely remote. 2. I have never seen any evidence of the claim that reciprocal links are penalized. All I have ever seen is a lot of hype and hysteria, backed up by references to other forum posts and articles participating in or preying on that hysteria.
I know the experience of one or two single sites doesn't constitute proof, but let me tell you my experience in any case. I have a site that was well placed in the Google SERPs for several keyword phrases. The linking structure to that page was 100% reciprocal. In fact I use to cite the success of this site as proof of the efficacy of reciprocal links. However in the February update, or whatever it was, this site was totally demoted. It does not appear in the top 200 for any of the keywords phrases that had been working for the prior year or two. I had made no recent changes to the site other than continuing to add more reciprocal links. The vast majority of the reciprocal links are from sites in the same basic business, hence thematically related or relevant. So based on this I've started to at least have second thoughts about Google's treatment of reciprocal links. A couple of other variables to consider in this sites demotion are: 1. The reciprocal linking is handled by LinksManager software. 2. While most of the IBL come from relevant sites they come from links pages on these sites not from content bearing pages within the sites. Any thoughts or comments would be welcome.
Compar, just curious, what is the major theme of the site you mention went down in February? I know Google seemed to have a problem with some LinksManager sites in the past.
I think either of those factors is a much more likely reason for the demotion than a penalty for reciprocal linking -- especially the fact that the links were from "links" pages with no content.
Compar, do you get your choice of linkback images for LinksManager? When I saw incoming links from sites using it discounted, it seemed there was one in particular that was not.
Sorry MidWest I don't understand the question. What are "linkback images"? All the links I exchange are pure text links and I get my choice of anchor text. And what was the "one in particular that was not"?
This is NOT a slam at you or your site, Bob, but I wonder if Google hasn't been focusing on pharmacy sites of late the way they did real estate sites in Florida. Again, not a personal observation or a critique of your site but it is an industry with more than its share of spam, hype, and dirty tricks. What about your other sites? Did you see any evidence of being hurt by reciprocal linking there? and if so, what were the circumstances?
When I noticed that some of the link pages run with LinksManager were discounted, and some were PR0'd, the only ones that seemed to still carry PR and count were the ones that used a corrupted version of the green striped animated gif that links to them. It wouldn't change. Quite ugly, too. They were also older users of the system, and I was not certain which really mattered. It made me wonder if those users were getting the data from a specific server, and somehow that mattered, or if the image perhaps was not fully loading, and Googlebot would not get a full page, and not see the hyperlink. I've never used the backend of the program, so I don't know if you could choose images or if the choices were based on which server the user's data was on.
I only run LinksManager on two other sites. One is another pharmacy and the second is a casino/sportsbook directory -- both of which fall into the type of sites Google may be demoting. Neither of these other sites show up in the top 50 in Google for any keywords despite ranking in the top ten on both Yahoo and MSN. The only question then is when you search on any of these search terms why does Google still return millions of sites and on what basis do they index the top 10 or 100? For awhile Google refused AdWord ads for pharmacy sites, and I noticed only public service ads on my pharmacy related AdSense pages, but recently they are again displaying a full set of pharmacy ads in AdSense.
This would correspond then to my assumption that it's not reciprocal linking that concerns Google but type of link and possible relevance of link, which we know they have the technology to put in place, if they haven't already done so...
So then you might agree that Google may have demoted reciprocal links between sites that are using "links pages" for displaying these links. Unfortunately that includes a lot of sites that are heavily into reciprocal linking and may in fact be what a lot of people are referring to when they use the term "reciprocal links". I, like you, would agree that if we exchanged link between home pages or other content pages of our sites that Google would not demote these simply because they are reciprocal.
Yes... I think it's possible that the "links page" thing is devalued, because they tend to be pointing to sites that have nothing to do with the page itself, i.e., it's a no content page and therefore there is no theme and therefore no relevancy is possible -- unless of course it's a page with a list of links all on the same topic but then it's unlikely it would be calle links.html -- I'm not suggesting that page title is the key here but the content of the page. It's scary, I know, but I can't disagree with anything you wrote in that last post (unless I just need more coffee to find it)...