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Shortly after stage 2 of the recent Google algo update began, I received an email from a panic stricken ex-client. He woke up on a Monday morning to find all of the recent gains we had made Google were gone.

I was a bit shocked to hear this because this particular project was as “white hat” as they come. And from a keyword standpoint, it wasn’t even close to being a space that any competent SEO would consider competitive.

My initial reaction was to simply ignore the email. He was no longer a paying client, so why waste the time looking into it? But then curiosity got the best of me. So I fired up some tools and started to do some digging.

What I discovered was that my ex-client had been very busy building links since our contract expired. In fact, he had managed to pickup about 7000 new links in about a month and a half. Almost all of these links were coming from a reciprocal linking network called GotLinks.

When I wrote him back and told him that developing that many links in such a short period of time probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, (especially when the top site in his space has been around since ‘95 and has only managed to collect a total of 250 inbound links) he promptly cancelled his GotLinks account and wrote the owner and asked that all his links be removed.

That led to a bunch of defensive emails from the owner which basically said that all the sites in his network were kickin’ ass and I was just an idiot who didn’t know what I was talking about.

He also sent the following email out to all his members:

We would like to thank all of our members for making GotLinks.com the most popular free link exchange directory on the Web. We now have over 5400 actives web sites in our directory which gives you a wide variety of link exchange partners to choose from.

As many of you may have noticed, the most recent Google update occurred within the last 2 weeks. We have received very positive feedback from many users about these updates with regards to increases in pagerank and rankings. This was especially true for our paid members since their links appear on the first page of all category pages.
If you are serious about increasing your pagerank and rankings, we encourage you to consider upgrading.

Benefits include:

-No daily link restrictions
- Automatic link requests
- Automatic link approvals
- Unlimited categories
- First page listings for your web site.

Please see http://www.gotlinks.com/free_upgrade.php for more information.

Now that doesn’t sound like an email from someone running a link network that just got torched by Google. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my ex-client getting the boot didn’t have anything to do with being included in the GotLinks system?

To be completely fair, I thought the best thing to do would be to spend a little time researching his network in order to get some kind of idea as to how effective it may or may not be.

So I collected a sample of 50 keyword phrases being targeted by sites in the GotLinks directory. (all of them were found on the first page) In order to get a balanced set of keywords, I randomly selected phrases from several different categories.

Here is the complete list:

As you can see, there are a few phrases that I would consider reasonably competitive. But there are also many phrases that even Doug Heil would have a chance ranking for. If the GotLinks network is a viable linking strategy worth considering, then I should certainly be able to find a good portion of my sample sites showing up in the top 10 across the three major engines.

So what did I actually find?

Ask Jeeves

• wedding harpist bay area #13

Google

• learn to play guitar #20

MSN

• internet marketing manager #1
• dell desktop computer #1
• brentwood ca mortgage broker #4
• window screens los angeles #4
• mold testing in new york #4
• nanny services #5
• los angeles furniture #7
• computer forums #21
• data storage #22
• fireplace screens #25

Yahoo

• mold testing in new york #1
• window screens los angeles #4
• database development #7
• website design orange county #8

Now I don’t know about you, but one top 20 listing in Google certainly isn’t enough to convince me that the GotLinks network is a place I want my clients to be.

But we all already new that, right? Anyone who wasn’t asleep for the last month knows that Google’s last update was all about penalizing sites for reciprocal linking. So why on earth would I spend the time writing about this topic? Google has made it clear they don’t like reciprocal link networks. So they released an algo that identified and penalized sites participating in them. That’s not really news. We all new it was coming.

But this situation is a bit different for a couple of reasons:

1. The site ranked well in Google before the links were added to the GotLinks network.

We had already made it through a traditional “sandbox” period and the site was ranking well for all our targeted terms. That is an important distinction because it suggests that the loss of rankings wasn’t simply caused by discounting a bunch of links that were responsible for the positions. The site ranked well before Google discovered the new links. And it is clearly penalized now. (Far worse than the original sandbox).

2. My ex-client never reciprocated.

It turns out that GotLinks was selling access to their network on a popular auction site. He paid some money and was added to the network, but he never hosted a GotLinks directory on his site. To me, that is also an important distinction because it suggests that this isn’t simply a case of an algorithm calculating the percentage of inbound links that are reciprocal and then adding a penalty if a certain threshold is exceeded.

This looks more like a penalty for

a) Exceeding a threshold for the total number of links developed in a specific time frame, or

b) Simply being included in a specific network.

Either way, it should be enough to get you to re-think your linking strategies. In the past, many webmasters (including my ex-client) have taken the position that Google applying a penalty based solely on inbound linking patterns wasn’t really possible. After all, you can’t control who links to you.