Google updates, is reciprocal linking dead?

Google updated it's algorithm again this week. Some of you may have already noticed it in your page ranks. We had a few of our sites all go up a notch in Google. If you don't know how to check your page rank it's quite easy. Download the Google toolbar
and install it. Whenever you surf to a webpage you will notice Google will rank it out of 10.

There is some speculation that the importance of reciprocal linking, the process of swapping links with other sites, has been lessened with this latest update. We noticed this because a few of the test sites we run, ranks increased even though we had not increased their reciprocal linking at all.

What many are speculating is that Google is trying to weed out false popularity links that come from link farms or link exchanges. One way that Google has always rated the importance of a web page is how many other pages on the net linked to it. The logic being that the more sites that link to your the more important it must be for the search term.

This is one of the first things that made Google stand apart from all the other search engines. Many online marketers tried to take advantage of this by setting up link exchanges or link farms basically getting thousands of non-genuine links back to their sites. Google strives, like all good search engines, to return the most accurate results possible. So this latest update looks like they are trying to be more accurate by weeding out link exchanges and some reciprocal linking and placing more importance on one way inbound links.

A couple of things you can do to get more one way inbound links to your site is to contribute online to forums that are related to your business interests and leave your web address behind or to contribute content to sites for a return link back to your site.

The main thing that you can always do is add quality content to your site consistently and others will start to link to it.

Now go and check your page rank ;-)