europeforvisitors - 5:53 pm on May 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

A few months ago, I linked to a travelogue site from one or two pages. They thanked me and said they were going to link back. One day I checked my backlinks in Google and found a huge number of links from the travelogue site. They'd linked to my site from their page margins for a whole slew of countries, resulting in what must have been hundreds of links to my home page.

Now, if Google automatically penalized for such links, I'd have been in trouble, because an outsider (such as Google) could easily have assumed that I'd bought or bartered for those hundreds of links. As it happened, my Google referrals did take a 75% hit in late March, but there was no across-the-board drop (or even an obvious pattern), so I have no reason to believe that a penalty was applied. More likely, the drop was the result of an algorithm change and Google's problems with redundant indexing of www and non-www URLs.

Granted, that's just a personal anecdote, but it does go to show that penalties over ROS or nearly-ROS links (with or without anchor text) aren't a sure thing. I'd guess that such penalties are actually quite rare and are applied manually if a site doesn't pass the "sniff test." Automatic penalties for heavy linking would make it too easy for Webmasters to harm honest competitors.

In short, if there's anything about your site that might look shady to a human evaluator, a large number of inbound links with the same anchor text might get you zapped. But if your site is clearly legit and "white hat" in other respects, it's reasonable to assume that you'll get the benefit of the doubt.

(Disclaimer: Like most other posts on Webmaster World, these observations represent my own personal opinion--nothing more, nothing less).