lol

I definitly dont see that it is dead, in fact in his post about Big Daddy, Matt does not specifically say "reciprocal linking" he says "excessive reciprocal linking"

This is pretty much the same thing they have always said, and he also went on to say that he adjusted the algo so that it did not censor these pages so much (Paraphrasing) it sounds like he is saying they turned up the filters to high in the beta phase.

What I would like to see is his definition of "excessive reciprocal linking" - because this could mean many things, it could be as harsh as every page from one site, links to every page of another site - they have been trying to lull this kind of linking for several years because it is a technique the hotel sites used to use to build a network of interlinked sites to dominate the serps in every regional market.

Now onto the real question - is reciprocal linking dead?

I currently have a site (A newer site) that has no linking "except" reciprocal linking and is currently #1 in MSN and #2 in yahoo for "area real estate" in a very high dollar competitive market. Even if google stopped counting recip links (I doubt they will ever penalize for normal link building) - it would still be alive and well in the support of MSN and Yahoo, which although they have less traffic, still are valuable.

I think the general concensus of the board (At least what I have seen) is that link building has evolved and in order to do the best job possible you should have a diverse linking portfolio including

Recip links
Article submissions
PR web
Sponsorship on relevant sites (Purchased for traffic and exposure, links are a nice side benefit, buying links for links sake is something G doesnt want IMO)
Blog posts
Forums

K I cant remember what I posted at the top of this post, so I think I need to hit the submit button

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I don't think its totally dead.
Reciprocal links is still a good source to have inbound links that helps you to get ranks.

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Interesting to say the least...

Then again in his closing thoughts:

In Matts post he showed images of the examples he considered low quality/poor linking and I agree they were spammy. I agree with Morgan, for the forseeable future, while they surely can detect them, they also have no alternative way to rank sites. Just think what sites would be at the top of the serps if the only good like were a naturally generated one way link. I think search would be pretty dismall.

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I found Matt's post to be confusing. As was mentioned in another thread here, I don't understand how linking to mortgage sites is not considered real estate related. My favorite mortgage brokers are almost like a team to me. In fact, they're more useful to me than competitor real estate agents. In most cases, the important factor of being able to purchase real estate is being able to get a mortgage. And Google doesn't think these two things are related?

I've always considered myself pretty picky & conservative with my link exchanges. Yet my pages have been deindexed on my Cook County site (although I'm seeing a few more added recently - but in very small numbers). Sure, I haven't gone through all of my links to see if some quality links are now "bad neighbors," but I just can't see how that site could have been flagged as a site with low trusted links & thereby deindexed.

I will say that I have listed my site in some non-real estate related directories (but in their real estate sections), based on a list created by a trusted seo person that is a member here. So I can't see that those kinds of links would be low trust.

Hopefully, I'll be getting my pages back in the index and I've even thought about creating new pages as a New Page instead of a Sub Page as it seems the deindexing occurred on 3rd level pages. I don't know if that will help or put my site's spidering navigation askew.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

Another question(s) relating Matt's blog post. If, indeed, we will get penalized for "excessive recip linking", then how does a site like mine, which focuses on many different areas that I work in, have a chance to gain top positions for many of those areas if I can't use a multitude of different anchor texts with link exchanges Personally, compared to others, I don't think I do excessive linking anyway. Yet my site was hit.

And please don't say how we need to concentrate on natural inbound links to our sites. The average real estate site isn't going to receive many, if any, non recip/non paid for, inbound links just because of their wonderful content. I've seen this answer come up so many times yet we all know how unlikely it is for most sites to get unasked for links from a different site.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

I think he used a poor selection of words for his observation of the quality, of course fish oil isn't related nor excersise equipment unless you think the fact that putting it into a house makes it real estate related. While mortgage and real estate are related.

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Reciprocal linking itself is not dead. In a lot of cases, it make sense for relative sites to link to each other. On the other hand, I think the type of link exchanging done between real estate websites is dead.

I've been trying to formulate a post on my blog about this, but there is so much crap to go into... We'll see how it goes...

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---cK

CK Chung is an independent SEO consultant who provides premium Holistic SEO services, including services specific to Real Estate SEO. You can find his alter-ego, Kid Disco, spouting off on his SEO blog at SEOdisco.

I wonder if the deindexing is related to the pages still having a PR? Any thoughts

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