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Went Hot: August 16, 2007 - 12:58 pm
Posted By: hector 689 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.webmasterworld.com)
Category: Link Building
updated their guidelines regarding link schemes and in particular reciprocal links
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&query=link+exchange&topic=&type
5 Comments
Comments
Yeah, it's much clearer now. (sarcasm)
They may as well delete the whole thing. Excessive link exchange...What is that? Excessive anything is bad, does it really need to be said.
Well I find it helpful. Since I try to work within the Google guidelines, my spam filter is currently set to reject all reciprocal link requests. In fact I usually have nowhere to put them. I think this could validate the use of a Resources page where relevant reciprocal links could be considered.
I think we all have a pretty good idea of where excessive begins.
If there's some dude in Bangalore sending out emails to thousands of people, that's excessive. If you need to use software to keep track of it all, that's excessive.
If you can remember every link exchange, who it was with, and can recall some reason for doing it other than SEO, then that's normal linking.
I was actually surprised by the initial guideline because it wasn't in line with their standard stance, which implied that any reciprocal links on your site is bad.
As JohnWeb pointed out, we still don't know what "excessive" exactly means, though I imagine like porn you know it when you see it. Claiming that the guideline is useless because the word "excessive" is unclear is an overeaction; Whether or not a site is swapping links excessively is usually not difficult to decide - at least for a professional SEO. In borderline cases, error on the side of caution.
On an adult link list for example, every outbound link that isn't an affiliate link is a reciprocal link. Each category page has between 20-100 reciprocal links, and site wide on a popular site like penisbot.com which rank first for "lesbian porn", you're talking about roughly 452,000+ reciprocal links.
When Google says nothing, webmasters bitch that Google should be more transparent; when Google opens up about what it does or plans to do internally, webmasters bitch that Google isn't being clear enough, is misleading, or is being hypocritical.
You can't have it both ways.
My point is that you could use the qualifier "excessive" for just about any technique and call it spam and against the guidelines, that is almost a given for anyone with common sense. Including it in the guidelines is just a statement of the obvious,which I deemed "useless".
Sorry if that offended anyone.