Often partner pages will no longer rank as well as they used to for many reasons.
My theory is that google can distinguish link pages due to the way in which we have set up this whole link exhcnage monster…
Let me explain….many of us have specific anchor text and descriptions that we use for our exchanges….some of us have been using the same ones for years….
Over time, google will see this same description etc…on hundreds (or possibly thousands) of websites around the web…
Once they see pages that contain these descriptions, that also exist on hundreds of other websites, it’s a fairly easy jump for them to determine these are link partner pages.
Now I will not say that the partner, or resource pages or whatever are worthless….but I think it makes a small bit of sense for google to rank those pages a bit lower than other pages in your site….(obviously there are exceptions to this….as some sites are designed in such a way to show these pages as more of the actual content of their sites…however this can be dangerous since all the pages would be filled with hundreds of little one and two sentance paragraphs that were actually duplicate content on hundreds of other websites.)
Now some here may disagree with some of these theories….and some may not….
I hope that some of this may stimulate the discussion more….because I would keep an open mind and be willing to adjust how I feel about some of this after hearing more theories and ideas…
Rick
Universal4