Should I Do Recips With All for Anchor Power or Theme my Partners?

Dilemma: Maintaining a Good Neighborhood vs. Amassing Quantity of Anchor Text

[phpmaven]

I have always been very cautious about who I trade links with, checking out the site and making sure it doesn't look spammy or farmy ;) I also make sure they are at least in Google and I often make judgements based on PR (yes I know the toolbar is broken). But I notice that many of my competitors have an "I'll link with anyone" attitude. I actually spoke to one of them about this and he repeated the "a link is a link is a link" mantra.

The thing is that this competitor outranking me on quite a few of my keywords and he was quite a few more backlinks than I do. Am I making a mistake being so picky or should I just link with everybody and his brother?

[ryan26]

It's good that you are picky but anchor text is definitely being passed regardless of topic. Push the topic boundries if you feel that you need the volume. It will help.

It is pretty much a given that future algorithms will look further into the semantic connection of a hyperlink. If a site is citing another website there SHOULD be some sort of topical connection if it is to be taken seriously. It's a matter of having the technology to make that type of judgment algorithmically.

[neuron]

Am I making a mistake being so picky or should I just link with everybody and his brother?

Yes and No, and it depends.

I would suggest you remain choosy in selecting link partners, but that you may very well be able to push the limits a good bit more than you are, as already suggested.

The trend today is to over-theme links, and this does cripple a lot of sites, the born-to-theme are some of the biggest whiners around and swear the end of the world is near for those who do not follow their narrowly themed lead. If you have a pet site you can reasonably link to child, family, home, garden, nature, educational, medical, legal, mortgage, automobile, and endless other categories of sites, but you might not want to link to porn, pills and casinos.

There's a trend towards more complex semantic mapping, but 50 years ago we were going to have a colony on The Moon in 15 years, and 2001 a space odessey seemed a perfectly reasonable projection of manned space travel back in 1970. What happened?