Google's 950 Penalty

[Halfdeck]

At the same time, reciprocal linking between similar sites is still a good idea, I think.

There's nothing inherently wrong with reciprocal linking. If I link to you one day because I like what you wrote, and then you link to me two months later because you liked something I said, that kind of reciprocal linking happens often and its not a problem.

It's also not about relevance; it's about intent: why are two sites linking to each other? If its an exchange to boost traffic or increase brand awareness, Google's recommendation is to tag the link with nofollow. If its an exchange to improve search engine ranking, then Google's recommendation is, again, tag it with nofollow.

Using nofollow is a last resort. A smarter approach is to reduce the chance of detection by making links look more organic.

As spacemanpiff said, Google doesn't mind a moderate level of exchanged links. If a large percentage of your IBLs is organic, a few link trades aren't going to hurt you.

This being so, is it enough to move the links from the bottom of our pages to somewhere in the middle (or put them all over the page) and, of course, change the anchor text and put a description to each site...or to be reincluded must we pull all of those links to show that we are not a part of that link farm anymore?

If you want to take a conservative approach, you might try emulating a directory-type layout. For example:

"http://www.business.com/directory/accounting/employment/"

Still, you might not see any improvement until Google is convinced the entire network is clean.

Though artifical links like cat-page links are potential problems, I think a bigger problem is the lack of organic links. Many mainstream sites rank using artifical links but they also have natural links as a supporting backbone to create a balanced link profile. We don't have that luxury.

I have a number of sites suffering from this "penalty" and none of them have link trades with other sites

Msnaughty has a few exchanged links (blogroll, links to free sites, sugasm links). On the other hand, forthegirls don't link out, and it ranks on the first page for its target keyword.