Hey Will, would you mind elaborating on this? I can't tell if you're saying you DID aggressively reciprocal link for this site, or DID NOT? In other words, do you think reciprocal linking is the problem, or that a lack of reciprocal linking is the problem?
I did agressive reciprocal linking with this site, and most of my link partners were agressively linking with others also.
The Internet Search Engines FAQ has been re-skinned! I do not believe that the ugly look and feel was responsible for the poor search engine rankings, but I listened to my audience and hired a CSS designer to make the site look better. Actually, I hired three designers. The first created a good design with bad CSS code. The second created a bad design with bad CSS code. The third created a bad design with good CSS code. Then, I made the third designer implement the first design! The result is what you see in production now. On a positive note, I am rolling this design out to a bunch of my web sites. The total cost-per-site will be negligible.
Be sure to let us know how the CTRs compare (relatively of course) once you get a few days under your belt with the new design.
CTR appears to have fallen approximately 5%, which is within the margin of error for a web site which receives as little traffic as this one. I am hoping that the new design increases the natural inbound links which this site very occasionally receives.
I finally snapped and sent this note to Google: Gentlemen: This site is still showing up as a PR0 in all 72 Google Data Centers and is still receiving no Google traffic, even though it has no shortage of great content and no shortage of inbound links. I have written Google many times about this site, to no avail. This has been going on for well over a year. I give up. I'm deleting the web site. If I forward the pages from this domain to another web site where people can receive help on search engine related topics, will that domain be penalized because I am forwarding a penalized domain to it? Will