We originally began the program as a means of increasing our visibility on the Web. We wanted to put a stylish and unique graphic on other sites to attract random surfers. The reciprocal link program has met with great success. In fact, we've been unable to keep up with link requests for well over a year, and many Webmasters have unfortunately removed links to Xenite.Org from their sites before we could review them.

But such disappointments, and the delays which lead to them, underscore a problem in the Webmastering community. That problem is the result of the manipulation certain commercial operations have sought to exercise over the Web community for the past several years. Regrettably, Xenite.Org's volunteer staff no longer has the time to review new site submissions.

Reciprocal linking has become a very controversial issue thanks in large part to the Google search engine. Google is not the first search engine to popularize linkage. They are just the most successful service to base their technology on it.

The assumption that Google, Inktomi, Altavista, and other services have made through the years is that Webmasters will only link to good Web sites. While this has never been true, has never been close to true, and probably never will be true, Google and the other companies have tried to make it true by rewarding sites with large numbers of links from other sites. The rewards for these sites have been top listings in their search results.

Over the past two years, Google has learned not to rely solely upon counting links. They were quickly taught just how foolish that idea is by people who abused their system. For a while, it became all the rage for people to inflate their site's apparent popularity by participating in automated link exchange programs. Xenite.Org participated in one such program for a while. But although that program satisfied our needs in general, the service provider shut it down because of continued attempts to circumvent their quality assurance measures.

The exchange of links between Web sites predates the existence of search engines. Search engines should not be setting the standards or requirements for Webmasters. However, so many Webmasters -- especially Webmasters trying to make money off of the Internet -- have become dependent upon traffic from search engines and directories that they now actively seek out reciprocal links with popular sites like Xenite.Org.

Some months ago, Google published a popular browser plug-in many people call "the Toolbar". It adds a little search box to your browser that lets you run queries on Google without having to load their site first. While it's a very useful mechanism, it's purely a marketing gimmick intended to inflate Google's importance to the average surfer. It is also an extremely successful marketing gimmick and other search services have begun offering their own toolbar plug-ins.

However, Google added a confounding twist to their plug-in which has caused no end of grief in the Webmastering community. You see, their plug-in will give you a quick evaluation of a site's "importance" (as determined by the Google database). How does Google decide which sites are most important? That algorithm is a trade secret. But they look at the size (number of pages) of a site, how fresh (frequency of updates) the site remains, how many other sites it links to, and HOW MANY SITES LINK TO IT.

Google got sneaky with its Toolbar, too. They called that quick evaluation estimate a PageRank. "PageRank" is a term that Google has long been associated with. The search engine originally employed an algorithm developed at Stanford University by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The algorithm was based on what Brin and Page called "PageRank" (it's anyone's guess who came up with this nonsense idea to begin with).

Brin and Page decided that the average Web surfer would just randomly click on links (which is seldom if ever the case -- surfers typically are looking for something specific, although it is easy to get distracted on occasion). They therefore developed their model on the assumption that there is never a pattern in any random sequence of link clicks. That is, you and I are supposedly just mindlessly clicking on links on every page we find just to see what comes up.

Brin and Page also decided that Webmasters will only link to "quality" Web sites, and that Webmasters are therefore "voting" for the best sites on the Internet. The problems with that assumption are that A) no one knows which sites are the best B) no one can possibly find let alone evaluate all the sites devoted to a given topic and C) most people are not qualified to be determining quality.

Well, all that's neither here nor there. Over the course of several years, Google sold this bill of goods to many people around the world. Whole businesses and industries have actually grown up around the Google link popularity model. Some companies depend entirely upon achieving and maintaining high link popularity either for their own sites or for their client sites.

There have always been get-rich-quick schemes. There probably always will be. The GRQ scheme which has become popular with Google watchers is to create a Web page with affiliate links to popular merchant sites, gather up a few dozen or a few hundred inbound links from other sites, and get good rankings on Google. The theory behind this scheme is that you and I, the mindless surfer who randomly clicks on any link presented to us, will first see THEIR pages and click on THEIR affiliate links, thus dropping 5% commissions in their pockets on whatever we buy over the Internet.

Now, Xenite.Org has nothing against participating in affiliate programs. We've been doing that for years, and we're not about to stop now. As long as we make $1300/year in commissions, our server fees and VBulletin forums license will be paid for.

But too many people are trying to make money off the Internet by creating affiliate link pages and boosting their link popularity so they can get great rankings on Google. This scheme has become so popular because the last darling of the GRQ crowd, Overture, has become too expensive for the casual Webmaster. Overture (formerly known as Goto), sells its search result placements to the highest bidder. If you want to be number 1 for the term "Get Rich Quick", all you have to do is agree to pay them more per click than anyone else.

Some search terms now cost several dollars per click through. If you're just setting up a cheap affiliate link shop, you most likely cannot afford to pay Overture $3 per click through just to get some random surfer to look at your site. Overture does also try to filter out obviously frivolous or misleading submissions. And they do make some money with their technology (although they have yet to make back the $500 million they lost, but that's another story).

While Overture was popular with the GRQ crowd, reciprocal link programs were pretty much left alone. It takes too much time to contact 1,000 Webmasters and ask them to link to your site. Unfortunately, as Google became more popular than any other search service -- and therefore produced more traffic than any other search service -- reciprocal link spam started to become a problem.

"Spam" normally refers to unsolicited bulk email. Now, most unsolicited bulk email is of a commercial nature. Some idiot trying to build a business has been sucked in by a spammer who is making millions of dollars bilking small businesses. Our email is flooded with useless offers of junk we neither want nor need.

Some GRQ nuts have been circulating "Send me 6 dollars" pyramid schemes via email for years. The latest craze in email spam scams is coming out of Africa, where people claiming to be heirs of huge fortunes are asking naive Americans (and Europeans) to send them money as a way of financing their legal costs (in exchange for a percentage of the inheritance -- of course, no one who sends money ever gets any back).

We get plenty of these kinds of emails all the time. But the reciprocal link GRQ crowd have started to overwhelm the traditional spammers. In fact, there is now at least one "company" out there which seems to do nothing but solicit gratuitous reciprocal links for its clients. We've received several requests from a firm which specializes in reciprocal link building programs. The emails inform us of all the benefits of reciprocal linking and how each party gains something from the exchange.

Well, folks, that USED to be true. However, Google hasn't played that game for quite a while. You see, as soon as enough people understood the original PageRank concept, they began setting up automated directory services which created link exchange pages. You'd download or receive new pages every week. The better programs monitored participation in the services, and some even tried to match sites with similar sites (thus improving the quality of such exchanges).

Xenite.Org participated in one program at first just to evaluate its ease of use and effectiveness. While we didn't notice any real boost in our search engine rankings (we were already doing pretty well), we did notice something unexpected: people were clicking on those links and visiting our site! So, was Google right? Were people randomly clicking on links? No. We were exchanging links only with other sites related to entertainment. Surfers looking for unique entertainment-related content were willing to explore our reciprocal links pages as well as those on other member sites.

So, Google be damned, we were realizing a legitimate benefit from participating in the reciprocal link program. And since it was managed by a third party, we didn't have to invest much time in it. It was a win-win situation for us all. Google, unfortunately, didn't like those types of programs and began penalizing sites participating in them by filtering out the links coming to them from other sites participating in the programs (it's very complicated -- but let it suffice to say that what is spelled out in the Stanford University paper NO LONGER WORKS).

Well, the link farmers fell by the wayside, but their demise opened up a new opportunity for programmers who decided they could make it easy for people to create "Web directories" based on reciprocal linking. Maybe you've received some solicitations like those, where someone contacts you and says, "Hey, our sites are similar! Let's exchange links!" And you check out their URL only to find they are using a cookie-cutter link directory to collect reciprocal links. We decided early on not to reciprocate with such sites.

Google eventually decided to filter out those kinds of links, too. So, naturally, people who don't understand Google continued to use them for up to a year after their usefulness had been rendered ineffective.

But Google started evaluating sites differently over a year ago. They began looking at "freshness". Web-loggers (bloggers) first noticed something was up when they were suddenly able to propel innocuous sites to the top of Google rankings. They did this by what they called "Google bombing", where a few dozen blogger sites would all link to the same site within the same week. Google, having noticed the blogs were updated daily or weekly, kept recrawling them and getting new links. Yes, the "link popularity" paid off, but people didn't understand WHY it was paying off.

You see, in the summer of 2001, Google decided that NEWS PAGES were important resources. In fact, they had finally conceded that surfers DON'T JUST RANDOMLY CLICK ON LINKS. Marketing study after marketing study has revealed that surfers are usually LOOKING FOR INFORMATION. And Google realized (with a lot of help from several marketing studies) THAT NEWS SITES PROVIDE INFORMATION. So, for that matter, do Web directories.

So, the 50 Ph.D. mathematicians who work for Google put their heads together and figured out that an easy way to determine if a site might be providing news or might be an active directory would be to determine how fresh its content is. That is, how often does the site content change? Anything which changes on a daily or weekly basis is probably serving up news or freshly reviewed links (I've omitted mention of the evil free-for-all links pages -- suffice it to say that they no longer help anyone but spammers, who collect email addresses from the submission forms).

Well, Google's genius analysis of Web surfer habits led them to give bloggers a great deal of power. Google now claims they have filtered out the blogs. Oboy.

In the meantime, people have begun to catch on to the freshness aspect. Now you're going to see sites serving up random text on a daily basis (targeted to specific keywords), probably drawn from files which contain up to 60 days' worth of text. The more sophisticated sites will include headlines, fake time stamps, and will combine snippets of text to confuse and confound Google's indexing program. In fact, most Perl programmers should be able to create scripts to do this in a matter of hours.

News content is, in fact, important to surfers. We want to be kept informed. Google's realization that surfers actually ARE looking for something specific now means that the most important sites (according to Google) are going to have "fresh" content. But Google also realizes that LEGITIMATE sites will do something that bogus sites won't: that is, they will link to other sites of similar content without expecting links back in return.

Xenite.Org has, actually, been doing this for years. That is, after all, what Web sites originally did. And Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page DID notice that originally, too. They just didn't understand WHY Webmasters were linking to each other (ignorance is bliss, and there has been a lot of bliss in the search service industry). Why Webmasters choose to link to other sites is not a simple matter. But after years of reviewing tens of thousands of sites, I know WHY: Because they feel like it.

That is the only reason why anyone puts a link on their pages. Maybe they think a site is a good resource. Maybe they just want to have the most comprehensive set of links on a given topic. Maybe they don't like what they have found, but having no better list of links, they go with what they can get until something better comes along. Maybe they are just trying to help out their friends and relatives. Do you know that some people have created Web sites which have realized no more than six to ten visitors in two years? I know, because I have been one of those six to ten visitors. Xenite.Org gets six to ten visitors per minute (heck, per SECOND on a good day).

I feel for the lonely Webmaster who wonders how all those other sites get so much traffic. I remember when I first got 25 visitors in a day, and I was thrilled. I had achieved a goal. But I kept setting goals, higher and higher.

The fact is, Google and other search services have made it difficult for the average Webmaster to build traffic. They keep imposing so many rules on us that we can no longer just focus on building the kind of content we want. Now, in order to achieve and maintain visibility, we have to build up link popularity.

Why? Because that is the way everyone thinks it works. And the sad fact is that Google hasn't worked that way for a long time. But they either don't care if people understand how it works or they WANT people to continue spamming each other endlessly. After all, if the manipulators don't know how to manipulate the search results, then the search results won't be skewed. Right? Wrong.

In fact, there are professional manipulators out there who set up huge networks of sites across multiple IP address blocks. Those sites link to each other, generate fresh content, and do everything necessary to fool Google (and other search services) into thinking they are "popular" and therefore "important". And, of course, as they achieve and maintain good rankings on Google and other services, they do become popular -- and therefore important. The self-rationalizing lie is the way the Web works now, but most people don't know how to beat the system, much less how to make it work legitimately.

Well, that brings us back to the Google Toolbar. You see, the vast majority of people out there (including many so-called professional Search Engine Optimization specialists) erroneously believe that the Toolbar PageRank value represents "link popularity". It doesn't. All it does is tell you how important Google has decided a specific page MAY be (a lot of times, the numbers are just made up by the plug-in based on a page's distance from the root URL of the site -- that is, www.xenite.org gets a P/R of 7 but www.xenite.org/anypage.html arbitrarily gets a P/R of 6, and www.xenite.org/anydirectory/anypage.html gets a P/R of 5, and so on).

Nonetheless, the latest craze is for people to seek out sites with high Toolbar PageRank values and solicit links from them. The reason why is that -- for a while -- Google placed emphasis on "quality link popularity". You see, realizing (eventually) that pure link popularity could be easily manipulated (and still is -- just check out a few sites with their own sub-domains), Google decided that it would qualify links between sites and give greater weight to "quality links".

Well, what the heck is a "quality link"? It's a link from a high-quality site (whatever that is) to a site WITH SIMILAR CONTENT. That last part of the equation hasn't quite filtered out to the reciprocal link spam community yet, but the lights are beginning to come on in some of the village houses down in the valley.

People are desperately searching for "high quality" sites. They have foolishly latched onto the notion that any site with a high PageRank value MUST be a quality site. Hence, any link from that site will be "a quality link". But even Google isn't THAT stupid. They are looking at what kind of content is linking to what kind of content. So, a link to a dog breeding Web site buried inside an article on duck hunting carries less weight than a link buried inside an article on dog breeding.

How good is Google at identifying similar content? I have no idea. I don't really care. Xenite.Org doesn't depend on Google for all its traffic. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. But I suspect that Google's 50 Ph.D. mathematicians have developed some very sophisticated text analyzing software. In fact, they have probably made some strides in natural language analysis (and I have been advising Webmasters to use non-hyped, natural language on their sites for years).

But Xenite.Org's reciprocal links program now stands out like a glowing star in an otherwise sparsely populated night sky. Yes, there are sites with higher PageRank values than ours. But we get a higher PageRank than most sites. As Yoda might say, "When 50,000+ pages of content you have, not so low will your PageRank be."

The bottom line is that there are a lot of people out there who are wasting their time trying to get sites like Xenite.Org to boost their quality link popularity. While it might have worked that way once, it really doesn't work that way any more. Google has moved on. Unfortunately, all the people who spend their days and nights reading outdated Web marketing advice won't catch on to this for at least another six months, possibly a year.

And that means that the traditional reciprocal link program is no longer worth pursuing. Xenite.Org will continue linking to sites we believe are worthy of note. We hope other sites will continue linking to us. But we're not going to ask people to exchange links with us. We don't have the time to review all the submissions. We don't have the time to play games with Google, or to try to educate the Webmastering community.

You see, if you've read this far, you're at least intrigued by what I've had to say. But if you're one of those so-called professionals who have been out there building up link popularity and getting good rankings, you really have no clue as to what you are doing BECAUSE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU'RE GETTING GOOD RANKINGS (clue: FRESHNESS OF CONTENT). You're probably sitting there thinking, "He's wrong. It still works."

Well, fine. Believe whatever the heck you want to believe. Write articles about link popularity on your Web site. Create a forum where you can lecture naive people about how important it is to exchange links with other sites. Maybe one day you'll understand that what Google really wants is FRESHNESS OF CONTENT.

And, yes, the link popularity factor is still part of their algorithm, but they aren't as stupid as most people seem to think they are. Google advocates a very dumb idea (link popularity), but they have become very good at making dumb ideas work better than they should. They are one step ahead of you guys.

Anyway, to all those honest, hard-working Webmasters who feel cheated because Xenite.Org (and eventually other large sites) will no longer actively exchange links, I offer these words of encouragement: Don't quit. We, and others, will find you. We will link to you. Maybe not all of us, but you really only need one good link from The Open Directory Project to get the ball rolling. It's free and it's a heck of a lot easier than finding and asking 100 PR 6+ Web sites to link to you (most of them probably won't anyway).

And if you visit good Web promotion forums like the Spider-food forums, where you'll find a variety of opinions from experienced people who aren't secretly in league with the search services (and by that I mean, those Spider-food folks who work for search services TELL YOU THEY DO), you'll learn a lot about how to get into Google, get good rankings, and keep them without having to be deceptive, manipulative, or having to hire someone to spam people for you.