Google Signals the End of Link Exchanges?

This weekend, google changed it's webmaster guidelines to remove the line 'Have other relevant sites link to yours.' - does this mean that the google axe is about to fall on link exchanges?

There has been a lot of speculation in the SEO industry and online forums regarding two very specific changes in the Google webmaster guidelines . The guidelines have been changed to remove two key bullet points. these are:

1. Have other relevant sites link to yours.
2. Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

The SEO experts have known for quite some time that Google's policy on paying for links on high ranking pages meant that both the page containing the link and the page which is linked to may be penalised in some way (this could mean that there is the possiblity that you could pay for links to your competitors websites in order to downgrade their ranking, but this supposition has yet to be proved.). Now it appears that just having a links directory on  your website could be bad news.

The official line from google is:

some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

source: google webmaster guidelines - 5/10/2008

In the current guidelines above, the main points to note are 'links intended to manupulate pagerank' - which means that if you have a links page that is just there to increase page rank, then you are in violation of the guidelines. The second point regarding link farms and bad neighbourhoods has long been understood to be bad for business and just about and search enginer optimiser (be it person or software) will be sure to avoid such dodgy ground.

The third point 'excessive reciprocal links or link exchanging' poses an interesting question - how do you define 'excessive' - it this more than 100 links on a single page? is it based on a ratio of outgoing to incoming links? is it X links per site divided by the number of pages in that site? I have yet to discover a definitive answer.

the relevency of clause 3 (as it shall hitherto be referred in this article) means that directories such as DMOZ which is purely used by webmasters to improve trustrank and pagerank - how many referrals from DMOZ have you ever had? In 5 years of SEO and millions of google referrals, I can count the number of DMOZ referrals on two hands. Therefore, perhaps google is reflecting this fact in its ranking changes, and DMOZ is no longer as important to them. Similarly Yahoo directory, which is a paid for link exchange facility violates the 4th clause - but has yet to be penalised in google's index.

A response to the issue from google appears on the google forums :

"This line was removed because we feel that you should not "force" other sites to link to yours. Obviously it's good that sites link to each other, it's fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don't think we need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should "have other sites link to yours" -- they should be willing to do that on their own, it should be their decision not yours. "

Does this mask the position that google would rather links were made for the sake of enhancing user experience of the web rather than to manipulate search engine positions? Possibly, but in a world where the difference between being on page 1 and page 2 of google can mean a difference in millions of dollars worth of online sales, then there will always be the need to scrabble to the top of the rankings using any means necessary.

There is also the position that having link directories, expecially niche or regional ones actually helps people find information more easily than they can in google. Human edited directories will always have better quality links that google because each entry is vetted by people to make sure the content 'does exactly what it says on the tin' and that misleading metatags, cloaked content, manipulated links and other measures designed to fool the algorithm will not work on an actual person. It some people's opinion that human edited directories have more power and relevency (although are much smaller and focussed) than the google index, and penalising such efforts is just another attempt by google to be top dog in the online searching world and trample on the little guys if they get too big for their boots.

Is this the end of link exchanges then? probably not, but you should try to do the following:

• you should not explicitly state that your links pages can only accept reciprocated links, allow any good website or online resource to be included in the links pages - remember your links pages should be a useful resource of related pages which enhances user experience.
• you should keep your links directory small of focused, and have editor approval of each link -not just automatically add them using an online form
• and you should review your links regularly to make sure the domain has not been taken over by link spammers.
• if you are using link exchange websites, make sure you are selective in which links you include and don't whack 2000 links on your website if very few of them are relevant or useful.

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