BigDave - 3:53 pm on Apr 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

Link to others freely, link to yourself carefully.

If there is a good reason to link to a different site of your's go ahead.

If you are just linking to boost it's rankings, be careful how you do it and try to come up with legitimate reasons to do the linking instead.

Heavy cross-linking, for no obvious reason, is asking for trouble if someone from Google checks it out.

I don't really thing that there is a cross-linking penalty. I believe that they do consider cross-linking as a factor, that when combined with other factors can lead to a penalty.

If you are just doing this as a way to increase your PR, then go for the hub and spoke method to be safer.

All your sites in the network should also stand on their own. Ask yourself if the site would be able to draw its own natural link from other sites, or is it just being a resource for the sites you are building?

While the internet move database [imdb.com...] is an amazon site, and it gets a lot of links from them, it is also a valuable resource for the public in general and receives all sorts of links for that reason. It would pass the test.

You also don't want to have all your sites filling up lots of searches, because it then becomes a quality control isssue for Google. Then they might have to ding you just to maintain *their* quality.