Google's Official Guidelines on Linking

[enlytend]

There's been speculation about this, now their official policy is part of their Webmaster Guidelines:

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results.

Full text here

That should "stir the pot" a little bit :D!

 

[Wesley]

Interesting... So basically don't link exchange unless you have related sites? And what about people who wikipedia link every noun? Does wikipedia suffer?

 

[bluearrow]

So basically they are asking not to keep links/partner pages or not to exchange links with non related sites ?! Well Fist they want to stop links selling and buying , i wonder where these all will stop at end.

 

[EGS]

Links to your site can never negatively affect your search engine rankings and/or placement (as this would make it way to easy for the competition to knock you out), but the sites you link to (such as adult sites, warez, etc) can/do.

 

[Smiler]

Thanks for the info. I'll keep that in mind.