webboy1 - 8:03 am on Aug 13, 2009 (gmt 0)

The best advice I could give on link building is to use common sense. If you think what you're doing is a little fishy, then Google will probably think the same.

Some examples:
- company site A links to Company sites B and C (with B and C linking back)

This is not a spam recipricol link. The brands / companies are owned by the same people so it makes sense that they might link to each other. It would be unfair of Engines to punish you for this. We link between our various brand sites and it has a positive impact on search rank because some of those sites are looked on better by Google than some other sites. Again though, use common sense. If you suddenly added 20-30 links from one brand site to another, things would start looking odd and the engines may frown.

In terms of sites with different langauges, what you'll probably find is that they perform better in their related Google Country. For example, a site with the same content but one in german (on a .de) and one in french (on a .fr) would most likely just result in one ranking in Google Germany and the other ranking in Google France. Slight problems would arise however if you had identical content on a .co.uk and a .com, both of which could rank in the Google Uk.

Reciprical linking or link exchanges that often cause people problems are largely to do with surges of links appearing from completely irrelevant sites. So, if you sell cars but overnight receive 100+ links from a website about flowers, there is no relation and it looks spammy. Similarly, there was a phase of people paying bloggers to write reviews. I've seen instances of people dropping from rankings because of this ... because they suddenly received 40 - 50 links from blog sites that were unrelated - and that were being recognised as spam themselves.

Hope this helps.