Link Development Forum

There are a few things you can do:

- Do everything with reason
- Check what other similar (unpunished) site set-ups do

Many, many sites have reciproc. links. They form natural ways of helping each other and the visitor and they show a form of a community.

As starters, I would say the best way to do it is as you described. Do not let the linking point to each others same page.

More importantly, let each site earn its own incoming links from different sites and let each site link out to different other sites.

As a guess, I would make sure that for every link pointing to my own sites
from my own sites, I would link out a six-fold of links to other independant sites. Same goes for independant back-links.

In addition to vitaplease's suggestions (which are very good I might add)

Have some unique pages that are only available in one site and link your others sites to these.

You're looking it this as a patterned plan and that may work. I tend to consider each link separately. I break each link down to its core by asking myself a few basic questions?

1. Why am I adding this link?
2. Does this link add value to the site? By value I consider:

a. Value to the searcher
b. Value to the themes
c. Value to the navigation
d. Value for the spiders
e. Value to a networking (reciprocal) relationship
f. Value for branding
g. Value to the marketing plan

I then might take it further and consider Linking Outside the Box [webmasterworld.com].