[Linkster]

Reviving this one - just got an email today - site is edited out but thought it was interesting that they considered the fact that other sites might leave links up to them after they pull all outgoing link trades - more interesting is that when I visited the LL I noticed that they had broken their categories down into pae 1, 2 etc and no cat link trades were on the first cat page at all - and this is before they started pulling links???

"Hi,

We really appreciate the link exchanges that you have done with us over the past years.

We have some link lists that are performing poorly in the Google SERPS and we're trying to figure out why. We've looked at a lot of on-site factors and made adjustments without much effect so far. We're now looking at the off-site factors that we think may effect rankings. This is not a "knee-jerk" reaction. We've been studying and experimenting since October on sites that started trending down at that time.

We think that google may have identified certain sites as part of a link farm (for lack of a better phrase). We think that this link farm consists of somewhere between 50 and 100 sites. If you look at the SERPS and go to the back (the 1000th result) and start looking forward you'll see a lot of pages from sites that are part of the same group of link exchanges. We not saying that these sites constitute a link farm in the usual sense like free-4-all schemes, but that Google may have tightened up their definition of link farms.

We are conducting an SEO experiment to see if we can identify this as the case. To do this, we are going to pull links to all sites on site. We are doing this because we really have no way of telling which sites/pages Google considers part of this link farm and which are not. We want to let Google spider this site for a few weeks and see that it is no longer linking to the same group of sites, then see what effect this has on our placement in the SERPS. We're not making any statements as to whether any sites are penalized or artificially dampened.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this may cause you. We encourage you to watch the SERPS to see if our experiment works. Please feel free to contact us at any time and we will gladly share our thoughts and findings with you.

We certainly understand if you want to pull your links to our site. It may help you to do this...we just don't know at this point. We own close to 400 sites and the only links we're pulling are the ones on site edited out.

As you know, sometimes SEO is just trial and error. A lot of the webmasters that we've spoken to have expressed the same concerns about linking to a big group of sites that all tend to link to each other. The only way to find out is by experimentation. This is what we are doing, we are trying something and letting all of our link exchange partners know up front so you too can watch the results, and hopefully benefit from this experiment too.

We are not ruling out putting links back on this site after the experiment...we just want to give it some time with no link exchanges on this one site to see what happens.

Again, thanks in advance for your patience and understanding."