Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Skip Chilcott, Sr. Product Manager of Microsoft openly asked webmasters to participate in a Link Exchange program in an article released last week. He also appeared to endorse several firms that use this technique, which is currently considered if not downright black hat at least an extremely muddy gray.

Google states: “…there are some webmasters who get involved in link exchange programs and other build partner pages just for the purpose of cross linking and disregarding the quality of links. This leaves a long term impact on their sites. But the strategy totally violate the set guidelines of Google Webmaster and can also have negative affect on search engine ranking results..”

Microsoft themselves have stated that use of link farming techniques and excessive reciprocal linking can “ affect the ranking of your website or even get your website removed from the search index.”

Yahoo also has stated in the past that sites that interconnect to an extreme degree have what amounts to worthless links and will probably face ranking problems.

Search engines have steadily become more competitive. We all depend on the search engines to find relevant information, and deliver it in a fast, understandable, sensibly ranked format. As people try to game, trick or circumvent the algorithms, the search engines fight even harder against spam and low quality results. We have to realize that low quality links will not be taken into consideration by search engines.

Google is one of the preferred search engines, and they have not only discounted the bad links taken strict actions in order to prevent webmasters from jumping the search ranking with black and grey hat SEO techniques.

It is true that reciprocal linking or participation in automated link exchange program however does not completely benefit users. These are only beneficial for the webmasters who game the whole system. And if despite of abiding to some strict rules, search engines are still gamed, they will lose their usefulness.

Why Skip from Microsoft gave advice like this hasn‘t been determined, but a follow up post clarified good linking habits; namely linking from and to relevant content only, linking for traffic not engine rankings, and avoiding anything that even smells like spam.

That sound more like the search engine we all know and love.