Robert_Charlton - 5:39 am on Feb 18, 2005 (gmt 0)

Out of curiosity, when you refer to post-Allegra loosening of cross linking, are you referring to a "handful" of related sites, or larger networks?

I'm talking about several handfuls I monitor... groups of two, four, six sites. These do have a few independent links (by "independent links," I mean links not coming from the same page or domain the other sites' links are coming from).

With one pair of sites, the site with the slightly lower PR has returned from oblivion to top rankings for its terms.

I must say I don't see any loosening for larger networks (e.g., 20+ sites).

The one larger network I watch is about 40 sites... all independent brick and mortar establishments with completely separate real-world identities under the same corporate umbrella. Here they have basically the same corporate links page on every site but practically no crosslinking elsewhere.

They're on the same server, though, and they often share the same directory category when they're listed in directories, because they're related by location and by business category. To varying degrees, they all have some independent links as well.

I'm seeing that for, say, 15 of these sites that are going after some of the same keywords, one or two are now ranking in the top 10. Once upon a time, they dominated half of the top 20... and, more recently, they'd all dropped way down.

I was surprised to see them return with Allegra. This is the group I was referring to when I said: "Not completely sure about interlinked sites going after the same keywords... This appears to have been relaxed somewhat."

travel.yahoo.com

Haven't look at it in any detail, but I've got to believe it would be a special case. I remember the first time I had a PR7 site to optimize, I could virtually do no wrong. It's amazing what several thousand really good, solid, independent inbounds will do to make a site credible (which in fact it was). travel.yahoo.com is much more credible than my PR7 was.