"As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight." Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team and he Blogs quite often on the subject of Search Engine Optimization. Felt it might be useful to share some of his more recent comments on the subject of excessive reciprocal linking:

* "Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking."

* "If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit)."

* "Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less."

* "…the entry doesn’t give great experience for users; heck, it’s not even a complete sentence. And it didn’t look really relevant for users for a diamond ring site to exchange links like this in potentially up to 329 different categories. As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less. As I said in January: “The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”

* "…I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future. We wanted to make it clear, if you’re being paid you should disclose that.”

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