SEO News
Has Jagger Killed Reciprocal Linking?
Although there's evidence to suggest Google have been devaluing reciprocal links for some time (especially unnatural ones), SE Roundtable points to the Search Engine Watch discussion Reciprocal Linking – Dead or Alive? asking how badly reciprocal linking has been affected since the Jagger updates. Google themselves (or at least Google Engineer Matt Cutts) have said Jagger would be targeting aggressive link-schemes.
The rational consensus seems to be that quality, on-topic links are and will likely remain valuable both in relation to SEO and also for direct traffic, and that off-topic and/or low quality links are either dead or very much near-to-extinction.
More Powerful Robots.txt Exclusion For Google
SEO Book points to Dan Thies's finding of a useful but non-standard robots.txt feature supported by the Google spider:
[...] Google has introduced increased flexibility to the robots.txt file standard through the use asterisks. Disallow patterns may include "*" to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in "$" to indicate the end of a name. To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /*.gif$
Although Google's explanation only mentions the wildcard syntax in context to their image bot, standard Googlebot also seems to understand it as well. For example:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*.php$
Would block all files ending with the php extension.
Good Time To Buy Neglected Domains
SEO Book gives some good reasons why now is a good time to buy in some old and neglected domains in your vertical.
Older domains can provide a good source of link popularity for you to point around, Google's algorithm also favors matured domains.
Since Google are believed to use WHOIS data, you may want to consider negotiating with the owner to keep their WHOIS details present. In doing this you can prevent any dampening filters that might otherwise be triggered when a domain is switches owner. Please be aware though, that ICANN can confiscate your domain for invalid/out-of-date WHOIS data.