Something I heard that sounded wrong

[ADAM Web Design]

I received a phone call earlier today from the friend of a client of mine, who also happens to be an employee from an SEO compan that is doing SEO work for the client free of charge. In the course of the conversation, the employee stated that "Google, MSN and Yahoo! will be discounting the weight of reciprocal links over the next couple of months, so we form 3-way and 4-way reciprocal links with people instead."

That sounded wrong to me, at least partly because sooner or later this is likely something that the SERPs would eventually catch on to at some point. But I'm not sure if this is the full reason why I'm suspicious. If the guy wasn't doing work for my client for free, I would have told him to buzz off, but because he is, I just let it go.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

[kgun]

I belive very few of the rumors surrounding SEO and SE's. When something like this

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

is generally known, it is most likely history. Only the inner circle at Coca Cola know their secrete formulae, and only the inner circle at the SE companies know their algorithms.

Perhaps you learn a lot by looking at how you and your competitors rank on the SERP's for different KW's.

But that is no proof. A lof of people on different forums generalises for k=1 to k=n.



Kjell Gunnar Bleivik
http://multifinanceit.com/
http://www.blognorway.com/

[brian.mark]

The problem is that rumors are hard to tell from lies, making the truth impossible to find. The "discounting reciprocal links" was supposed to be fact some time ago, but I haven't really seen any signs (other than jacob's post) that they have any different weight than a non-recip. At SES, the "Link Experts" including the likes of Eric Ward, Greg Boser, Patrick Gavin and others all seemed to agree that they see no signs of this and because there are many legitimate reasons why recip linking occurs it would be bad to discount it entirely.

Relevance seems to be the factor they're chasing, not reciprocal. We link to DeWALT, DeWALT links to us. That makes perfect business sense from both sides and makes sense to the visitor, so there is no reason to expect that it won't make sense to the search engines. Off-topic recip linking or even one-way links are what don't make sense to anyone, so those are getting discounted and people have blamed recip as the reason instead of lack of value to the visitor.

Engines want to think like a user - eventually they'll get there.

Brian.

[ADAM Web Design]

brian.mark: that's my line of thinking as well. A three-way or four-way reciprocal link is less useful since it only makes the user click multiple links to get to the intended destination.

For example, if you're Site D and I'm Site A, do I want my users going to Sites B and then C to get to you if your link is that sound?

[cyanide]

I don't know about the 3 or 4-way, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit, if reciprocal linking is being discounted or filtered or dampened. I think it's already on its way