From
http://forums.seochat.com/t59161/s.html
Matt Cutts at PubCom
Matt just did a Q&A for all of PubCon and then an Adhok .15 hours with about 100 of us asking questions. Lots of great info but some of what stood out to me:
1. He confirmed that Google is now actively identifying reciprical linking strategies, 3-way linking strategies and purchased links, both programatically and by human intervention. He did not say exactly how they were handled, but he made it clear that those links, once identified wh=ould not be very valuable. He specifically suggested that is was silly to think that Google does not keep track of sites selling links. He suggests that if you go down the road of buyng links, know that you will likely be buying something of little or no value.
2. He confirmed that humans manually went through every Jagger spam report and manually removed MANY spam sites.
3. He stated unequivically that Google does not and in fact cannot manually add or raise the ranking of a site by hand, but that they can and do manually penalize and/or remove sites for legal reasons or spam.
4. He stated that thinking Google won't notice 3-way linking as easily as reciprical linking is silly.
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So, what does this mean for your own linking strategies in the future? I feel a bit like Chicken Little yelling, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" but I will repeat the strategy that I have been harping on over the past year: Mini article link exchanges!
Write 3, 4, or 10 mini articles and trade those with other webmasters to develop your links. Also, look in to article submissions across the internet.
"But what about duplicate content penalties!" cried the skeptics. Remember, just because you write an article does not mean that you have to publish that article
on your own web site.
I said it before and I'll say it again: There will come a time in the not too distant future when hundreds of thousands of web sites drop to the Google dungeons. All of these site will have relied upon poor linking strategies.
Don't let your SEO efforts be reactive to algorithm changes. Be proactive in your strategies. For over 2 years now everyone has known that links and anchor text are important with Google. So, if you were Google
what steps would you take to combat link spam? This is what I try to do, and I believe it's the reason why our sites have survived the Florida and Jagger updates.
The future of Google linking strategy
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