Yahoo and reciprocal linking

[Netdetective]

I finally got a reply back from Yahoo, but I'm not sure where to begin.

"Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!'s
Content Quality Guidelines located at:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html"

Some people have claimed Yahoo dislikes reciprocal linking, so I'm wondering if my "resources" directory could be the problem. Should I just do some serious house cleaning and remove all unrelated links such as pharma, gambling, keeping only the highest quality related links or do they expect me to remove my link partner pages all together?

I checked my site for duplicate content with copyscape.com and as expected, my reciprocal links pages are naturally showing tons of it, since link partners mostly use the same information all over the net.

I did earlier put in a robots.txt exclusion for Slurp and my links pages, but that's probably not good enough for Yahoo.

My site in question is in my profile.
Fred

[David Wallace]

Yahoo definitely does not like duplicate content. You might also check and make sure you are not linking to any sites that they have penalized. I have seen penalties removed from sites after they got rid of links they had to bad sites.

Of course in my own opinion, if you are participating in one of those reciprocal linking programs, I'd stop and rather try to earn links naturally and link out where it makes best sense for your visitors.

[Netdetective]

You must be referring to those programs like Linksmanager. I'm not participating in any of those. I manage my reciprocal links manually.

I have been busy working on cleaning up my link partner pages, and It's sure a lot of work! I found quite a few that weren't linking back. I don't know if Yahoo has a problem with reciprocal linking in general, or linking to too many unrelated sites.

One method to get one-way links is writing and publishing articles. I have only done 3 so far. I badly need to do more.

[andrewshim]

Yahoo definitely does not like duplicate content. You might also check and make sure you are not linking to any sites that they have penalized. I have seen penalties removed from sites after they got rid of links they had to bad sites.

Of course in my own opinion, if you are participating in one of those reciprocal linking programs, I'd stop and rather try to earn links naturally and link out where it makes best sense for your visitors.

Am concerned about this issue too. I notice that Yahoo! seems to be doing a major re-indexing. Many sites that have never appeared in the serps have suddenly pushed me down to #42 (used to be #6).

David, can you elaborate on duplicate content. How do I check if I'm linking to sites that have been penalized when I have hundreds of links. Do I do it one by one???

I am using LinkMarket to find reciprocal link exchanges. Would this be considered bad? I do have a number of articles published on many websites. Seems to me that there are different schools of thought about recip links. Should I just do away with them?

Your thoughts very much appreciated!