Hello everyone,
Fortunately this isn't my problem, but this is something i have just noticed very recently and i guess it worths paying a bit of attention to.
We have a huge list of (a few hundreds) directories on various topics. Many of these can be found by browsing this site too. I usually have someone adding sites into these directories for me. We have been using this list for a few months already and it went ok. Last time the list was used was about one month ago and it was all ok.
A few days ago i asked the person that works for me to start inserting some new site into the directories. Yesterday this person came to me and showed me something very interesting. Out of all directories which are generally doing fine, the ones that were asking for a reciprocal link in return are all VANISHED from google.
PR=0, and they do not show in index anymore (site: etc returns nothing). I could not believe this. We had about 30 sites which asked for a recip link as a condition for accepting the site. All are vanished - all at once. All others are ok, no significant changes detected. An example for such a banned site could be tatet.com.
I believe that Google has increased the filtering on non-related reciprocal links, particularly on directories which have a lot of outbound links. I do not know the real cause of this, perhaps the presence of many bad quality signals... i guess it is up to more experienced
SEO guys here to come to a conclusion on this.
So what i am getting out of this, is - directory owners, stop asking for reciprocal links when submitting to your directory, or you risk being banned.