An update to my recent Google, Linking, and BigDaddy post……

Matt Cutts has posted an extended entry on his blog about BigDaddy, and he offers a couple more nuggets about the impact of links on how your site is treated by BigDaddy. Specifically, he’s referring to sites that complained about losing pages in Google’s index after the BigDaddy change.

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

He goes on to say that they tweaked the system to not be as harsh on those kinds of sites, yet goes on later in the post to list a couple specific examples of sites that have been hurt by involvement in off-topic reciprocal link schemes.

Takeaway: Be careful who you link to.