Here is an observation I wanted to share. Until recently I was running a link exchange with a site in the same vertical as ours. I'm not a real fan of recips and this exchange was setup before my involvement with the site. We had a home page static link halfway down the page pointing to their main URL so they would have been getting a good amount of traffic from us. I noticed they were running the return link to us as a "sitewide" in the footer in dark grey on black so you could not even see it - total spam and a risk to their site. I pointed this out to the site owner and as things turned out he was not the type of guy who liked being told. End of link exchange deal. No big deal but I did notice we dropped to the second page for our primary keyword after about 3 days. The point here is that I though Google was better than this as our rankings were clearly influenced by this "spammy" tactic. As we are a large "authority" site the overall impact on the traffic has been slight but I thought it was worth sharing.
