Link exchange services and link exchange software have been around for quite a while. Some 'search engine experts' claim they are a good method to increase the ranking of your website. However Google engineers are not sleeping. If you look into Google's Webmaster Guidelines you will find that Google suggest not to participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank and to particularly avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

This advice found it's way into Google's Bigdaddy update. According to Matt Cutts of Google Inc., Bigdaddy created a criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site were dropped from the index. Examples that might cause that, include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

In order to find out the intent of webmasters, Google has increased the importance of links, both inbound and outbound even more. Before the Bigdaddy, an overused tactic for strong placement at Google saw webmasters trying to bulk up on incoming links from where-ever they could. This practice saw the rise of link farms, link exchange programs and often poorly planned reciprocal link networks.

One of the ways Google tries to judge the intent of webmasters is by mapping the network of incoming and outgoing links associated with a domain. Links, according to Google, should exist only as navigation or information references that benefit the site visitor. Google examines the outbound links from a page or document and compares them against its list of inbound links, checking to see how many match up and how many are directed towards, and/or coming from pages featuring unrelated or irrelevant content. Links pointing to or from irrelevant content or reciprocal links between topically unrelated sites are easily spotted and their value to the overall site ranking downgraded or even eliminated.

The subject of links brings up a matter in Google's inbound link analysis that is sometimes being referred to as Google Bowling. As part of its scan of the network of links associated with a document or URL, Google keeps a detailed record of who links to who, how long the link has been established, if there is a recip link back, along with several other items. One of those items appears to be an examination of how and why webmasters might purchase links from another site. Google has tried to deal with the predatory practice of "Google Bowling" by considering the behaviour of webmasters whose site have seen a number of inbound links from "bad neighbourhoods" suddenly appear. If a site that has incoming links from bad places also has or creates links directed out-bound to bad places, the incoming links are judged more harshly. If, on the other hand, a website has a sudden influx of bad-neighbourhood links but does not contain outbound-links directed to bad places, the inbound ones might not be judged as harshly.

Having worked on dozens of sites that were brought to us by clients that got dropped by Google we can only confirm that Bigdaddy works: free link exchange - a bad idea!

Stick to traditional marketing methods that work on the Internet!