Brett_Tabke - 1:40 pm on Mar 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

Thank you for the excellent summation of the issues. It puts an important historical backdrop on where linking is going.

The current state of the "linking industry" as a "programmed" entity, is all but dead. However, there are a few out there still working the awards pages, guestbook autosigners, and even a few full blown fake forums. It's only a matter of time before they call it quits.

What the search engines have done to linking, is in some respects a crime. Whenever a webmaster is afraid of linking or stuffs links for search engine purposes, it's a crime.

I had a good friend ask for a recip link from a page just this last weekend. His page was 100% incontext, ontopic, and quality. I'd love to shoot some traffic his way off the page. However, the page in question is a pr7 page with large numbers of se referrals. I'm not going upset that balance with an off site links. eg: a crime has been committed.

Where is linking going? Two directions:

a) old boy buddy networks were the p7's keep the club to themselves with a very high bar to entry.
b) Back to obfuscation and cloaking. Who wants to open link these days? Links have become the new currency of the web. Doled out by high ranking sites in bartering style of a smoke filled room at the back.