A previous link sharing concept for better search engine ranking has been severely attacked by recent change in algorithm by Google. This early October, most of the websites which were involved in link sharing (either reciprocal or non-reciprocal) have been penalized by Google. I found all my websites which shared links drop its position from top ten to beyond top 100. Google doesn’t want anybody to share link for SEO purpose. Sharing links with other websites mean rating your website on your own. Google developed a system to recognize a link as a genuine or fake. All the links manually shared are considered as fake links for which the ranking of a website is dropped.

With this action from Google, websites which share links, which used to receive thousands of traffic from Google, now receives just about 10% of previous traffic. Google had warned all webmasters to avoid bad neighborhood. Google had notified webmasters about risk of link sharing through their webmasters guideline. Google says, websites must be built focusing on users – not search engines. People who follow this guideline are sure to have benefits from Google. So, even I suggest everyone to follow what Google says if you want better ranking at Google. If you want your website to be ranked well at Google and other search engines, read webmaster guidelines and follow SEO tricks that are within webmaster guideline published by particular search engine.