Why Can't We Be Friends? A Linking Lesson

Have you ever gotten a message from a blogger asking you to do a link exchange? Ever asked to exchange links with a particular blog? Or maybe you've even posted on a forum about link swapping with fellow webmasters? If you have, you might be some of the people google is fighting to get rid of.

Google started out in 1997 with the saying "Don't be evil" and since that time, they've been fighting webmaster evil all across the net. If you are running a link exchange, google may just have to punish you, it might not be today or tomorrow, but it will come. Now if you're like me, you started out many sites using link exchanges and the ever popular "I'll review you if you link to me" campaigns. These days are over now, though, google believes that reciprocal linking among webmasters is an "evil link scheme" to raise pageranks. This might be true for some, but I generally believe in a good link trade system, it can bring webmasters who share common interests together as friends instead of competition. Once again, google is shaking its head. They don't want webmasters to be friends, they want to pit us against each other in domes of marketing and pagerank battles. My advice to you all is forget about google, build your links, trade links with sites that are close to your niche and don't worry about your pagerank. If you simply blog with quality content and relevant linking, google will no longer matter in the long run. Ask John.

Another thing google shakes its index finger at, is paid links. There is nothing worse than small sites getting linked to by bigger sites for money. I guess google thinks servers pay for themselves these days. However, with text-link-ads becoming more and more popular, its hard to say if google will ban them all, or only certain sites. Thousands of sites buy and sell links everyday and are not penalized, I guess "Don't be evil" only applies to those making six-figure incomes. But wait. What does adsense do? What about adwords? Google's hate of text-link-ads and private link sales stems from their highest profiting products. When people can't buy or trade links with anyone else without being penalized, who do we look to?
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