Mutual link swapping has been the subject of countless spammy SEO (search engine optimization) emails over the years. Some random webmaster or SEO guru emails you out of the blue, claims to really luuuurv your website and wants to add you to their link directory in exchange for you adding their text link to your homepage.

I’m sure a lot of people are suckered into this, imagining that the process will actually boost their pagerank (PR) in Google and lead to millions of new visitors.

Well, it doesn’t. Search engine algorithms can spot linkswaps a mile off and any directory listing on a mediocre site is going to be irrelevant anyway given that the pagerank is diluted among all the outbound links on any given page. How much link juice do you think your site will get from a single PR5 page with 99 other links? Not a lot I can tell you.

So, it’s always with interest that I read blog posts about novel techniques that really might boost your ranking…but perhaps not in the way you imagine and almost certainly not in terms of PR.

Ari Herzog recently discussed how to enhance your blog comment by sharing a page and then linking to the debate. Basically, the idea is to create lots of cross-talk between your blog and other people’s blogs by sharing ideas, trackbacking, commenting etc. All very good and certainly the fundamental stuff on which social media is being built – the idea that we should share our thoughts and give credit where credit is due. It’s something many of us, myself and Ari included, have been doing for many years anyway, but it’s nice to see it spelled out every now and then especially for the n00bs.

But, there is possibly something to be concerned about. Remember the early days of SEO, when those with less than white hats discovered that building lots of links on the same anchor text could actually lead to a PR de-ranking? well, the kind of social media link building we’re all involved in, in which one’s name/keywords are being linked from comment boxes across the web, could cause problems with the search engine algorithms if they calculate that you are getting too many new links too fast (because you’re commenting rather frequently).

Moreover, the trackbacking and mutual commenting could be calculated by those same algorithms as mutual link swapping across blogs and could again be perceived as a spammy, or blackhat activity, by those same search engine algorithms.

So, while it’s obviously of benefit to us all to cross-link in terms of relationships and the social aspects it may ultimately have a detrimental impact on SEO; which despite appearances is still important for gaining new readers who don’t happen to follow the same blogs and feeds as we do.

I promised Ari that I’d write a post on this subject in response to his blog and I have linked back to him, but I’d be interested to learn from any SEOs out there whether they think this kind of web 2.0 activity might be more blackhat than whitehat…