Has anyone read this?
http://www.webstatsgold.com/are-rec...-links-dead.htm

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Yup,

I've seen similar.... I don't think the reciprocal link is quite dead yet, you just have to be a bit more "clever" about it ... ie don't make a list of links, but make the page more like a hub or resource with some commentary and analysis....

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

That's good news, Paz, because I've tried to make my links page more interesting, ie. I've written some commentary, also a small article, about the links, and even put a photograph on the page. A picture on a links page! That's pretty revolutionary, as far I'm aware.
I did it for aesthetic reasons, because the page looked boring when it was just a list of names. I might try to improve it some more, if I can think of some good ideas.
I also put in some non recip links, to sites that don't seem to do recip links, sites that I liked and visitors might like. It's only three or four links out, and I've got quite a few coming in, to compensate for it.

Anyone that claims that reciprocal links are dead is either misinformed or just a complete fool. Links as a factor in ranking will never be dead - they will just be analyzed more closely to filter out the garbage.

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I realize that inbound links are always going to be a large factor in the ranking process, I just thought that it was an interesting article. I know that there has been a large effort on the part of the SE's to better evalulate the quality of the links due to the recent spam blog uprising. I don't know if you have heard about this, but there has been a bunch of people that have put up a whole bunch of fake blogs with sudo-dynamic content for the sole purpose of increasing inbound links to their primary sites.

I guess this quickly caught on, and the search engines decided they had to do something to stop the fake blog spam. Once again, when the spammers find a way to work the SE's the SE's create a new algorithem.

There is just no substitute for good content that people want to read.

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Yes. What you're referring to is called scraping. The other variation uses software to grab news and post it to a blog. IMO they are both crap.

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I suspect that Google has this ideal, this ideal that linking enriches the web, that it promotes the exchange of ideas.
I've heard the counter argument to this, that it likes linking because linking favours the big sites, which it allegedly prefers, but I'm more attracted to the `ideal' argument.
So Google can either forget this ideal, give up, say to the abusers ok you win, or it can try to beat them.
I'm not sucking up to Google, to be quite honest I find that linking is a pain in the a**. The mechanics of it, the mechanics of having to contact people, having to upload new links, is boring, uncreative.
But I can also see things from Google's (supposed) point of view, that a few appropriate links can enrich a site, and hence enrich the web.