Links - Pageview or Siteview?

[glengara]

The "received wisdom" is that G looks at pages rather than sites, however, to "see' reciprocal links it would need to look at the linkage of the entire site.
So is the fear of a reciprocal link penalty unfounded?

[ciml]

I think it's a red herring. I've never seen an indication that Google penalises reciprocity.

If SiteA is relevant to SiteB, then it's quite normal for SiteB to be relevant to SiteA.

[glengara]

So IYO, G is not looking at overall site linkage?

[ciml]

I wouldn't go quite that far.

The famous PR0 penalty was to do with link relationships between domains, Google weight links differently if they come from outwith the domain and the 'too similar anchor text' thing only applies to links from outwith the domain; but I don't see reciprocal links as having any bearing on anything (whether reciprocated from the same page, or another page on the domain).

[glengara]

Maybe I shouldn't have used the term "penalty" ;-)
It's just I've read a number of posts that suggest "lost" links are probably due to G discounting irrelevant recips.