I hope you know importance of back links in seo. Lets say that more and more sites linkst to each other till almost every site links to every other site, what googe/y/msn would do to rank pages??
Don't go for quantity, but quality. That's long term SEO. Read about it here: http://www.jimboykin.com/site-backlinks/
ok, i undestand, but what bugs me is what would happen if to many peoples would know about SEO, and too many people would exchange links. i imagine that people will add reciprocal links to boost their position and bring more traffic, will reciprocal linking be ignored?
If everyone knew about SEO then everyone would have more links and things would be more competitive. There's no way every site could link to every other site, there are thousands of new websites created every day. We'd all have to spend all day adding links!
I think that all the search engines whould notice the activity and change the way sites are indexed. Many sites spammed there meta tags and now they are useless. ( correct me if I am wrong) Search engines are always competing to have the best search results and none of them are going to allow garbage sites to reach the top of any search or no human would use the engine, and thats what search engine owners want.
You do realize that using links to determine page "quality" is cheating, right? The reason the search engines uses links in their algorithms is because they are not advanced enough to look at a page and determine how useful it is. It is a hard problem, no doubt - but until they can do that better - the use of links in rankings will be important and open to manipulation.
That is exactly why he asked that question, what whould happen if people started to abuse the fact that search engines rank sites based on the links to them. Search engines also base your ranking on content in the site and I am pretty sure they can determine if something is duplicate. I read in another post about a person who placed a site wide ad on a forum and he was wondering if the massive amount of links to his site whould effect his ranking and most people said that it would. This is probably one of the ways that search engines prevent massive instant link exchanges. In any case, reciprocal links are weighed less then 1 way links so if every site linked together they would not be too important.