Dealing with Reciprocal Linking

how to counteract penalties

[ionchannels]

Hi,
As a service to those who link to me, I wrote a script to automatically detect incoming referrals, filter out the spam and display a normal a href link to the referring sites (top 10 from a rolling 30 day average). I have lost 5-10 spots on my most important keywords from Jagger3 and I was wondering if reciprocal links could be the cause.

If I were to change the outgoing links to go to a redirect script or add rel=nofollow to the tag, would this cause google to no longer consider it a reciprocal link? I am also considering removing this feature altogether, but I would rather keep it. Any advice?
Thanks...

[watercrazed]

I would not use the nofollow, I looked into doing it and determined that it would be effective now, but it is not what it was intended for and might incure a penalty on the next update unless google saw it as user contributed content.

Make sure your script is making the link page/s tightly themed and related to your site.

I personally believe that recip links are still valuable but maybe not as much as before, - that might account for a small drop but not a plunge, ie into the 100+ results range.

[ownerrim]

"...but it is not what it was intended for and might incure a penalty on the next update unless google saw it as user contributed content."

Where do we always get this penalty conspiracy stuff? What penalty? How can google possibly get into the mind of a webmaster to determine why he or she did or did not use "no follow". I really doubt they have the desire or personnel to waste on evaluating the motives of any webmaster who uses this attribute.

[stubear]

"I wrote a script to ... filter out the spam and display a normal a href link"

Hey, you should work for google ;)

[neuron]

I have lost 5-10 spots on my most important keywords from Jagger3 and I was wondering if reciprocal links could be the cause.

not likely

my main sites are all powered by reciprocal links, ahem, quality reciprocal links, likely on a scale, from what it sounds, an order of magnitude or two more than yours. Jagger kicked them all down, but now they're back. #1 and #2 for the main two keyterms.

Unscathed through another update, and I just sat and didn't change a thing.