buckworks - 2:58 pm on Jul 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

<more conjecture>

and the links are topical

I think that will be the key to all of this. Relevance, relevance, relevance.

Before you panic about link exchanges, spend some time playing with the Adwords keyword suggestion tool to get a feel for Google's ability to identify things that are related.

Google has crunched enough data to know that tables are relevant to chairs and also to dishes. It knows that "tuxedo" can relate to cummerbunds or cats. It knows that bacon is relevant to eggs, and also to Kevin. And so on ... so if a site about tables linked to sites about chairs and dishes, the algo would see some logic in that.

If a widget manufacturer linked to the retailers who sell his products, and many of those retailers linked back to the manufacturer as a reference for their users, by any logical human standard that ought to be seen as evidence for the "widget relevancy" of those sites. So it likely is in the algo too.

On the other hand, it would make sense for the algo to look askance at a site with a pattern of trading links for no discernible reason of relevance.

If a human user would look at your links and wonder, "what's that got to do with anything?", the algo will probably wonder that too. As well it should.

</conjecture>

My own approach to all of this will be to keep on trading links when it would be relevant, and Google can make of that what it wills.