Question About Reciprocal Linking

How careful do I need to be?

[needsomehelp]

I have been carefully trading reciprocal links, choosing sites related to my industry and avoiding FFA link exchanges or anything that looks spammy.

My question is, does Google penalize for using the same title and description when swapping links? I ask because after this last update I have seen several competitors in different industries get dropped from the index, not white page rank penalty. These sites held number one positions for several terms for months.

I have done extensive studying and the only similarity I have seen is that these dropped sites have all their links on other sites as sameTitle and sameDescription.

Would this cause them to be dropped?

[Hunter]

No, that would not be the reason for what you are seeing. You've got to remember that it is possible for a site to link to you using a title and des that you suggest on one of your pages or that they could have just copied the title and des from another link to you or from a directory etc...

[Dave_Hill]

as I understand it you can't be penalized by links to you from linkfarms (otherwise people would add compediters to linkfarms!), the only problem people seem to agree on is not to link to a linkfarm. So what if my links site is disconnected from the rest of the site? No links from anywhere in my site to links.htm, but a linkfarming FFA from links.htm? I'm just indiscriminitly trading links on free trade sites, some of which will raise my rank and some of which will do no harm. As long as I don't get penalized for linking out to them from a disconnected page I'll be happy. Actually I think I'll take some of the java scripting advice to heart and make sure google doesn't see the outbound link spam-o-rama.