Chris and the folks at seroundtable did a great job overviewing a recent WMW discussion on link building, which involved an official Google rep...

More here.

Very seriously worth reading if you're involved in link building, curious about link building or new to the topic.

Bottom line folks, as spelled out by Adam from Google, over at WMW, is that recip links are getting the less-valued treatment by Google now, and G knows what to look for overall these days, so yeah, sold links are getting the less-trust paintjob, too.

As I've always maintained, if you're going to exchange links, chase links or sell/buy links, be very clear WHY you're doing it and be ready for the results.

Yet again, content is the key to long-term results - build it and they will come is still a valid statement.

Duane

Now go read that article.

Hey sportsguy...

This still doesn't answer my question about the blogosphere exchanging links.

It's very common practice for blogs to link to each other on their blog rolls.

Also, it will occur quite regularly that blogs will heavily link to one another for events such as Carnival of Personal Finance etc. The whole idea is a big link fest, masked as article and info sharing.

I remember that when I published my blog regularly and started to get links from all of the personal finance blogs, my traffic skyrocketed, and my PR jumped with google.

Blogs are a very natural way to discuss ideas and other people's blogs.

I have never heard any word about blogs being penalized for this activity. I've also seen many blogs that are PR7 & PR8 where the bloggers are robotic about posting, and receive tons of links to them. They're also linking out a bunch.

The discussion continues..