recips still out there

[Sam Chapman]

I'm still seeing lots of sites with blatent recip pages. After seeing sites get punished a year or more ago, many of us did away with them. The same is true for many blogrolls. So any speculation on why the algo has not been changed to punish sites still doing this?

[webmaster]

Because natural link reciprocation is completely acceptable - thus it is very challenging if not impossible to "penalize" in an automated manner - thus these kinds of situations are almost (that I have seen) universally handled upon manual review.

The best thing you can do (if it's a competitor and you want them to be forced to play fair) is document in clear detail their activities and file a robust report to Google.

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

[Sam Chapman]

Good answer - thanks, Morgan.