Reno - 10:00 pm on Jul 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I thoroughly understand that PageRank is what sets Google apart from all the others, and is a primary reason for their meteoric rise. What concerns me is the appearance that PageRank is SO crucial to their architecture that they have now actively begun discouraging websites from engaging in reciprocal linkage, which as I said has been a fundamental traffic driving technique since the mass popularity of the WWW exploded in 1995 (BTW, well before Google's conception).

Here again is what they say at the link which cnvi referenced:

...(cross-linking) can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results

It would be perfectly fine for me to have Google say "crosslinking is considered to be PageRank neutral -- it will neither help you nor hurt you". So people could trade links without any expectation whatsoever of gaining PR.

But the notion that it can actually injure a siteowner by trading links? Well, that's a bit much, and to my eyes, an example of Google overstepping what is reasonable.

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