From the official Google webmaster central blog - "Official news on
crawling and indexing sites for the Google index"

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...opularity.html

"To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition
away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there
still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most
effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO
consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward
sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by
choice."

You may also be interested in Matt Cutts' thoughts on the practice of
"link baiting"

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...d-linkbaiting/

Matt

I don't see why reciprocal links are necessarily bad.

My site at http://www.isham/research.co.uk/ibm.html links to Hesh
Wiener's site at http://www.tech-news.com and vice versa - we both deal
in IBM mainframe issues, but he's more market-oriented and I'm more
performance and future oriented.

I contend that both site's links are actually useful to anyone browsing
either site.

On 17 Dec 2006 06:57:50 -0800, "Phil Payne"
<EMAIL REMOVED> scrawled:

> I don't see why reciprocal links are necessarily bad.
>
> My site at http://www.isham/research.co.uk/ibm.html links to Hesh
> Wiener's site at http://www.tech-news.com and vice versa - we both deal
> in IBM mainframe issues, but he's more market-oriented and I'm more
> performance and future oriented.
>
> I contend that both site's links are actually useful to anyone browsing
> either site.

There's a difference between two sites choosing to link to each other
and one site saying "I'll only link to you if you link to me."

I run an information site, so I link to a wide variety of sites. Some
link back to me, some don't. My goal is to serve my visiters, so I
add links regardless of whether they link to me, and don't bother to
let them know that I've linked to them. If someone contacts me saying
"You link to me and I'll link to you, here's the text you should use"
then they go in the trash bin unless I see a compelling reason to
include their site.

--
MGW
I have yet to see a problem, however complicated, which when you looked at
it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. ~ Poul Anderson

Matt Probert wrote:
> From the official Google webmaster central blog - "Official news on
> crawling and indexing sites for the Google index"
>
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...opularity.html
>
> "To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition
> away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there
> still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most
> effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO
> consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward
> sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by
> choice."
>
> You may also be interested in Matt Cutts' thoughts on the practice of
> "link baiting"
>
> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...d-linkbaiting/
>
> Matt

right
the new algorithm will be able to tell manual, sweat-of-the-brow
linking, from cut-pasties and farms.
will they be able to tell if it's done with notepad, dreamweaver or
phplinks?