Robert_Charlton - 8:34 pm on Oct 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

serenoo - I'm assuming that your link exchange page question is relating to the situation of your original post about guidelines, and I'm putting the two posts together.

I don't know the context of the Google answer, nor do I know if Ashley is an official Google rep or just another webmaster posting his theories.

I'd think, though, that if the outbound links on your site are predominantly to sites that have linked to you, or to other sites that you control, or to spam sites in bad neighborhoods... or to some combination of these... then Google might feel that you're breaking this particular Quality Guideline... [google.com...]

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.