apollo - 2:21 am on Jun 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

Yes you have pinpointed the major problem with the cross-linking penalty. Our instructions are to 'try to keep it sensible' and 'useful for the user', both inherently nebulous concepts.

The other really weird thing to emerge is how if you hide your cross-linking with javascript so you can still provide related links to your user but google cannot follow them and penalise you, then google now apparently wants to follow your javascript to find out the links you are trying to hide from it. Presumably you will then be subject to cross-linking penalities even though your code has been developed by consciously avoiding any pagerank boost from your cross-linking.