Forget about trying to slip reciprocal links past the master of the Google search algorithm. Fuggedaboutit. He knows why your PageRank dropped like a lead balloon.
The most famous engineer at Google couldn’t make the trip to SES Chicago, but did post about his experience on a link panel at a past conference. It would appear rumors about the demise of reciprocal paid links may be true, as Cutts wrote:
The main point I want to get across is that in 1-2 minutes, it was easy to tell whether a site was (over)doing reciprocal links or trying to buy links. One site said: “we used to be doing okay last year, but for some reason we’re just not doing as well this year.” And I was able to tell them why: they had no spam penalties, but Google is getting better at handling paid links, and the paid links that might have helped them last year just weren’t doing them any good now.
With webmasters firing URLs at Cutts left and right, he was in his element, with his “pimped out Firefox ready to go.” Cutts handled them all, without breaking stride.
The highlight of his post comes when Cutts fields a question from a legitimate firm, with a great site in terms of architecture and spider-friendliness. However, he immediately found the problem:
They had lots of really good backlinks, including industry-specific links. But I could also tell that they’d been buying some backlinks. And they were buying backlinks from the exact same place as one of the earlier sites! At the point when in a minute of typing, I can say: you guys are both trying to buy backlinks, and I can tell that you’re buying them from the same network, and here’s an example page from ketv.com where both of you are even on the same page, and it’s not doing you any good at all: that just made my day. Having a concrete demonstration is so much better than just making a claim…
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
