Are Reciprocal Links Dead?
If the current indications are correct we may be looking at the end of reciprocal linking as a method of building rank and link popularity, at least as far as Google is concerned. The latest ‘Google Dance’, nicknamed ‘Jagger’, has caused major concern by those suffering loss of position on the top ranks of the search engine’s listings. So we decided to take a close look at what is happening and see what we could learn. We have a few small websites that have a limited number of links. These sites are used mostly for research and testing of our primary business in Web Analytics. By analyzing these sites, we were able to quickly get an idea of what is happening in Google’s Jagger Update, which is still in progress at the time of this writing. By using our web analytics tools, we were able to look at the history of visits by the bots and the links to these small sites. We had to go back as far as January in order to build a picture of Google’s actions. Our software also allows us to look a
