Understanding SEO With Aedig

I’m not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it).

It’s not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad – if I link to Aaron’s SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me, that’s not what I’d call “reciprocal linking.”

I’m referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites – the “you link to me and I’ll link to you” phenomenon.

These aren’t hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic.