Is it true that excessive link exchange.......

[jusen]

Is it true that excessive link exchange can negatively impact your site or can get you banned??? BAsed from recent google webmaster report...

[tamecrow]

Absolutely. Only link to sites which you actively endorse as a relevant and authoritative resource related to your website, and only seek links in the same medium. Create good content that people will want to link to, and believe me, they will.

[Webnauts]

See what Google says about that: Webmaster Help Center - Link schemes

[mjtaylor]

Yes, it's true.

[bart0r]

im not so sure myself... Excessive link building that might make a difference, but for half a dozen links which arent related, i dont think will do much hard.

searching google for 'click here' takes you straight to adobe pdf, i.e websites not related.

[cass-hacks]

im not so sure myself... Excessive

"Excessive" being the operative word asked about.

The question is though, what is considered "excessive"?

Google seems to be purposefully unclear, as they are on many other subjects where a "little" is OK but a "lot" is not.

The next obvious question is, "How lucky are you feeling today?"

[erikko]

just want to ask if that risk will also be inherent to excessive link baiting

[wige]

I think excessive is by definition unclear, because what amounts to excessive is going to depend on other factors - total number of links, size of the site, distribution of links etc - to form a sliding scale. What is excessive to one site might be negligible to another site. Basically, avoid it, but some reciprocal links are unavoidable and won't get you penalized - they just won't get you much benefit either. (Like excessive, some is an intangible, incalculable quantity based on a myriad of factors. So don't ask me to quantify it.)

Excessive link baiting, on the other hand, will probably be less of a problem. However, it must be approached carefully. I take it by link baiting you are referring to some form of viral marketing. Because the links generated are one way editorial links, this will benefit you. However, too many inbound links gained over too short a time, relative to the number of existing links could trigger a spam flag for the search engines. If you have a very successful viral campaign and triple your total IBLs in a week, the search engines may start discounting the new links. However, if you already have a good deal of established IBLs, you will probably only get a pure benefit from the new links.