BizSugar.com › Online Marketing › Link Exchanges: Bad for SEO and Usability

The search engines use links (along with a multitude of other factors) to help determine a site’s reputation. Since Google has the ability to crawl the entire web as needed, the search giant knows exactly how many links a website has, where they are coming from, what other sites those sources link to, what “neighborhood” links are around, what anchor text is being used and much more. In short, Google knows everything about your website’s link portfolio.