Google's 950 Penalty

[Maj. Stress]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

You seem to not grasp the fact that exchanging links is a violation of Google guidelines.

The operative word there is "guidelines". Normal link exchanges as far as I can tell do not raise flags. People have been exchanging links way before the phrase "page rank" existed.

As far as the talk about bad neighborhoods, I like to look at it another way. Is your page really optimized for the target keyword(s)? And if it is, does the search engine algo recognize your target keywords to be relevant to the industry you are promoting or something else?