Hiding Reciprocal Links???

I was looking at a link profile for a site I used to compete with when I was at another company. This site is now ranked 1 on google for a two word keyword that is the main broad keyword for the industry. The company I worked at is now #3 on Google since laying me off in June.

So the link profile of the competing site now at #1 is largely reciprocal links. I can tell because Yahoo Site Explorer shows the url like this http://thewebsite.com/links. And when I go look at the directory, it's a link exchange. All of them are related and relevant. But the problem is that I can't find the "links" page for this website. Are they hiding it from viewers somehow? I looked at their sitemap (html) and didn't see the links page.

And if they are hiding it, isn't this bad ethics since the reciprocal sites are displaying his links??

Any ideas?

You really don't know that they are reciprocal.

Some directories that only allow reciprocals really don't check. You can post a link one day, get the dir listing, and take it down later that afternoon.

That said, they also could be placing their recip links randomly throughout the site to make it harder for competitors to figure it out.

Regardless, they could also be paying for listing in these directories. Just because a listings page is advertised one way doesn't mean you can't contact the webmaster and work something else out.

<rant name="assumptions" content="a lot of them">All that said, I'd just like to say that the only reason I'm bothering to answer this is because you obviously don't truly care, because it's a former employer's competition and has no bearing on your day to day activities now. I have full faith that you will not go wasting the next two months in a downward spiral of submitting your current sites to directories, because you obviously know it wouldn't be worth the effort. You apparently know that dirs are not golden. They help rank peanuts, and camoflauge other links. That's about all they're worth, and you are fully aware of this, otherwise you wouldn't be spending time looking up the link profile of a former competitor and asking how they're hiding reciprocal links from all of their pointless directories in what seems like an attempt by you to do the same to make your own dir listings more valuable.</rant>

okay, that makes sense and is kind of what I thought. He was requesting recip links, but not reciprocating!

Most likley he is using a threeway link building service...

How do threeway link building services work? Wouldn't it involve his site linking out to site B, site B links to site C and C links back to his site? If that's true, why wouldn't I see the outbound links on his site?

Besides, I thought this was bad for SEO...

Another company is giving the link back. These services cost about $5 to $15 per link.

No inward link actually hurt you it is questionable how much these links help. If the market is not very competative it may be enough to win the SERPs.

They also can be used to get internal pages ranking for longtails.

Many companies in low labour cost countries offer these types of link building services.