sublime1 - 12:19 am on Jun 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

This network of sites thing is very interesting. While it certainly makes sense that some clever campaign of linking various sites to each other in a surreptitious way must be bad, it's pretty common for sites that are related to link to each other in a footer (repeated on every page). Can it really be that a simple footer link, which is open and honest, provides full disclosure to users, and pretty much put there for non-SEO networking reasons can be said to be bad?

Perhaps this kind of interlinking provides no special benefit? But why should it provide less benefit than interlinks between pages of a site? But a penalty?

It would seem to me that Google needs to be more clever than this. Penalties are a dangerous thing as they can catch people unwittingly doing something as well as they can catch the real bad guys.

The other thing that seems to be going on is that PR seems to be playing a less important role than it used to. So the pure PR-passing schemes that were dicsussed a year ago might have worked then, but now it seems less likely. How much weight could the link text of a site about widgets with N pages/links inter-linking with a site about gadgets with M pages/links really provide?