Happened across a nice little discussion regarding reciprocal linking and thought we would give a snippet of it here with a link to the authors blog if you are interested in the full story. Good stuff from WebGuerrilla. . .
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Shortly after stage 2 of the recent Google algo update began, I received an email from a panic stricken ex-client. He woke up on a Monday morning to find all of the recent gains we had made Google were gone.
I was a bit shocked to hear this because this particular project was as “white hat” as they come. And from a keyword standpoint, it wasn’t even close to being a space that any competent SEO would consider competitive.
My initial reaction was to simply ignore the email. He was no longer a paying client, so why waste the time looking into it? But then curiosity got the best of me. So I fired up some tools and started to do some digging.
What I discovered was that my ex-client had been very busy building links since our contract expired. In fact, he had managed to pickup about 7000 new links in about a month and a half. Almost all of these links were coming from a reciprocal linking network called GotLinks.
When I wrote him back and told him that developing that many links in such a short period of time probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, (especially when the top site in his space has been around since ’95 and has only managed to collect a total of 250 inbound links) he promptly cancelled his GotLinks account and wrote the owner and asked that all his links be removed.
That led to a bunch of defensive emails from the owner which basically said that all the sites in his network were kickin’ ass and I was just an idiot who didn’t know what I was talking about.