robots.txt and exchanged links

[member22]

Hello,

I have people who want to exchange links with me and I am willing to do it even though I know it is better not to exchange ( it seems that google penalizes a bit if you exchange links ) is that right ?

So my idea is to exchange links but put a robot.txt in my FTP for the page that has the links ? so that google doesn't penalize me ?

Would that work ? or is google still going to see the pages and links ?

Thank you,
Mike

[tedster]

Google does not penalize for exchanged links - but they often dampen the value of the links or ignore them when they calcualte rankings.

You certain can block the links page with robots.txt, or add a nofollow meta tag. But it's not something you need to do. Reciprocal links are common and they do not cause a penalty.

[Shaddows]

Quite a few veteran link-exchangers tend to check that their link is not 'nofollow'. I would guess they would also check the host page is bot-accessible