Being new to this site, I'm reading a lot of posts having to do with link exchanges. This is what I read recently from WebPosition Gold's newsletter regarding natural vs. artificial link structures:

Search engines like natural link structures and hate artificial ones.

-A natural link structure has inbound anchor text that varies, inbound link counts increase gradually, site links out to only reputable pages, and links are RARELY reciprocal.

-An artificial link structure has inbound anchor text that is identical, inbound link count increases suddenly, site links out to link farms or web rings, and has a high percentage of links that are reciprocal.

They recommend building the most natural-looking link structure possible. From a search engine's point of view, the best kind of links are unrequested links. The engines are looking to bestow high rankings on only those pages that people voluntarily link to due to great content - not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links.

I'd appreciate comments, etc.

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