Forum Moderators: martinibuster
How can I refuse to reciprocate the link? Could you advise a polite way not to offend the linkers?
If you link to other sites, you may have better chances with Google. Moreover, they say that you'd rather link from most pages of your sites to high quality on-theme sites than create a Resources page and link only from that page. So, outbound links should be integrated into the site structure.
Well... Having followed this policy on 7 or 8 sites with great SE results and high PR for all of them it is hard to see how linking to other sites will improve rankings. I just don't think that links pages are interesting (personally) and I certainly don't think they are needed on some sites. On a personal or informational site, fine, but on an ecommerce site- they're just another way out of your site. When people surf our sites I want them to have to go to their favourites, the address bar or close their browser down to get out of there. I want to make it more work for them to go than to stay- we all know how lazy we are when we browse, and links out are just an invitation to leave.
Sometimes it is worth wondering if Google are just trying to sow seeds of confusion and doubt among webmasters with some of the things which they claim. We can't take everything Googleguy says as gospel (sorry Googleguy). A clear example of this is hidden text- which is still turning up in results- along with a host of other things which Google have said that are unacceptable.