Google speaks out on "excessive" reciprocal linking

I don't think it’s any exaggeration to say that many in the seo community will be left reeling by the latest announcement from Matt Cutts (a Google employee) on reciprocal link exchanges. Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who comments on search engine optimisation (seo) issues in his blog. His seo blog entries are thought to be very carefully vetted by Google and it's generally accepted that if Matt Cutts speaks out on an issue, then it's official Google policy. Hidden away in the text of a recent blog entry discussing reported problems with site indexing after the Bigdaddy update, Cutts suggests that webmasters who have problems have had their pages dropped because they show:

"....excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling."

The Bigdaddy update started in December 2005 and was fully deployed at the end of March 2006. Many webmasters have since complained that only a fraction of their web pages have been indexed. People speculated that Google was overloaded after so many recent new services such as Google Trends, Google Desktop 4, and Google Co-op etc. Others suggested that there was a flaw in the update itself, which resulted in large numbers of pages being dropped. Now Matt Cutts has gone on the record to say that sites have had pages excluded from Google's main index because they’ve been deemed either as involved in "excessive" reciprocal linking or linking into spammy neighbourhoods. Since Google's "Hilltop" and "Jagger" updates, it's been the case that reciprocal links with non-relevant sites has't given the SERPS rankings boost that it used to and many webmasters have acted to clean up their links pages. It was always acknowledged though, that non-relevant links didn't necessarily hurt a site and that they were just ignored by Google. With the Bigdaddy udate, Google have gone one further in targeting link exchanges, apparently penalising sites by removing their pages from their index. SEO for Google has just got a little more interesting..... PS. If you’re website has suddenly lost a large number of pages in Google, you can ask for a site review in our search engine optimisation forum. We can't promise anything, but we'll take a look for you.