SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Search Engine Watch has a post about the first documented case of being banned on Live.com for doing link exchanges.

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Google has manual site reviewers to prevent manipulation of the search index. Since majority of the traffic to a site comes from the first 30 results, there’s suspicion of a 30 position penalty.

To avoid any appearance of a reciprocal link exchange, you can perform three-way link exchanges. This, of course, requires you to have multiple sites to offer a link from. The best way to ensure against any possible future issues with link exchanges if you are still determined to do so, however, is to request RELATED links only. Thus a wedding site may request links from wedding photographers, caterers, limo services, etc. Getting link-backs from any website under the Sun is sure to hurt in the long run if it hasn’t already.

Froogle Merchant Center has now been replaced with Google Base. This move merges the two data sources in line with Google Base’s purpose: to gather structured data for other Google services’ consumption.

For those businesses running pay-per-click advertising campaigns on Google, you’ll want to improve the quality of your landing pages. Ad landing pages will be automatically spidered by a new AdsBot which assesses the quality of an ad campaign by the content of landing pages. This quality score coupled with the bid price and clickthrough rate is used to determine AdRank, the actual position where an ad will appear in the search results.

You may choose to exclude landing page spidering by the new AdsBot but it will hurt your final Quality Score.

We believe that a non-participating advertiser does detract from the user’s search experience, and from the overall quality of the AdWords program. While you can exclude your site from review, this will provide us with little information about your landing page’s quality and relevance. Therefore, if you restrict AdWords from visiting your landing pages, you will experience a drop in Quality Scores for your related keywords.

This is slightly different from the announcement made earlier about the spidering of landing pages for quality score determination. If neither the AdSense MediaPartners Bot or regular Googlebot spider the page or was blocked from spidering by these bots, then AdWords wouldn’t be able to assess the page.