nippi - 12:11 am on May 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Konrad

This comment

"I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling."

Does not mean Google are doing this
if there is a link somewhere on website A to website B and
vice-versa (back links) and the pages in both cases are named "resources" or "links" or ... a few other possibilities and Google can find one of the following on those websites: "links exchange", "add/submit link/url" and possibly other
then : let's ban both websites.

Its such a stretch.

So

No

I don;t think you are right. I think Google is working out ways to detect quality of links, but is not penalising simply for recip links. Ditto on paid links, or it would be a snap to buy them for someone else's site, and take it down.