Yahoo! On Excessive Usage Of Reciprocal Links!

A majority of search engines are of the view that the process of providing reciprocal links refers to 'spamming.' Yahoo, in their Search Content Quality Guidelines, has also given certain examples of content that they don’t want to include in their search engine. Here is one of them:

• Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity (link schemes)

Yahoo’s patent application that deals with link manipulations is equipped with a big section on reciprocal links:

Abstract

A method for identifying reciprocal links is provided. At a particular host, the set of hosts which link to the particular host and the set of hosts to which the particular host links are determined. The intersection and union of the two sets of hosts are also determined, and the sizes of the intersection and union are calculated.

The concentration of reciprocal links at the particular host is calculated based on the sizes of the intersection and union. A ratio of the intersection size to the union size is used to determine the concentration of reciprocal links. The particular host’s rank in a list of ranked search results may be changed as a result of identification of a high concentration of reciprocal links.

More info at Huomah

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!