Gotta throw some link love at WebGuerilla, who, despite his claims to the contrary, offers up an excellent in-depth look at his investigations into a link network called GotLinks. A bit of digging on Greg's part has yielded the following:
It turns out that GotLinks was selling access to their network on a popular auction site. He paid some money and was added to the network, but he never hosted a GotLinks directory on his site. To me, that is also an important distinction because it suggests that this isn’t simply a case of an algorithm calculating the percentage of inbound links that are reciprocal and then adding a penalty if a certain threshold is exceeded.
This looks more like a penalty for
a) Exceeding a threshold for the total number of links developed in a specific time frame, or
b) Simply being included in a specific network.
Either way, it should be enough to get you to re-think your linking strategies. In the past, many webmasters (including my ex-client) have taken the position that Google applying a penalty based solely on inbound linking patterns wasn’t really possible. After all, you can’t control who links to you.
If they did that, wouldn’t that open up the door for competitive sabotage?
I know some black-hats who'll be pointing links at some mid-size competitors to see if this really is an effective tactic... In fact, if anyone does, please email me and I'd love to cover it in the future. Link sabotage is just a discovery away from being a prime SEO tactic... After all, if the search engines punish the receiver of the links, they obviously can't recognize the perpetrator - it's a very secure BH technique.
Great advice - Bob. The funny thing is, 3-ways and recips in and of themselves aren't damaging, they're practically the structure of the web. Almost any industry site or blog that links to you is also linking to someone that you link to... the trick is getting rid of those obviously manipulative link pages and having real links in real content.
getranked: Those are called 3 way links or triangular links. Google can no doubt pick this out as easily as 2 way reciprocal links. I think most people feel that reciprocal links have seen an ongoing devaluing and I think it would be fair to say that for 3 way links it is the same. In link building the idea is to diversify. Try to add orginial and quality content to your site that will get you natural links. If you trade some links with other companies that enhance the experience of your visits and put them on a partners page I don't think that will hurt you. There are a number of quality directories you can get into, and you should consider writing quality articles and submitting them to some of the better article sites. If you have news worthy advancements on your site a press release is in order. Text link rents on releveant site that will give you click though can be a good thing also. You may want to also consider a blog and then submit your blog to Robin Good's list of blog directories. There are lots of good articles on link building out there. Google them up. Hope this helps abit.
Bulding on door #1, seems like it is possible to lose all credit for certain anchor text no matter where the links come from, if your site/page exceeds a certain threshold for that anchor or total links. Not sure if that makes sense. :)
I have a question about reciprocal links, that I'd like to get your opinion on. If I have 2 sites, Site A and B, and I offer a link to a different site on Site B and ask them to link to Site A. Would this be considered as a negative linking scheme, where it might get a penalty on all sites involved?
If there is a penalty for having purchased links pointed towards your site there won't be for long. Simply not counting them is much more safe method to follow for google and there is no threat of link sabotage