bird - 8:14 pm on Jan 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

>>"As far as I know, it's not a crime to have more links to your site than the competition. "

WELL if all those links are coming from half a dozen sites then IT darn well should be. heh!

So this whole thread is essentially just about wishful thinking? ;)

Sites should not get extra boost for having 50+ links coming from 1 site. This excessive crosslinking is what I was talking about. This is something Google clearly states should not be done in their webmaster guidelines!

This may be news to some, but more than a year ago we had heated discussions here about "bad neighbourhoods". It was recommended by GG not to link *into* such neighbourhoods, or your page would be put into the same categoyr. Links out of a bad neighbourhood are still likely ignored today.

So what is a bad neighbourhood? The most convincing explanation is about groups of pages (pages, not sites!), which define closed circular linking patterns. Once such a group is identified, which technically is relatively simple, the result depends on whether and by how much those internal links outnumber incoming links from outside the group. The fewer external links there are, the less value is given to the internal ones. Note that this is not about the number of links, just about the relation between different types of links. And it has nothing at all to do with "similarity" of any kind.