Robert_Charlton - 7:14 am on Mar 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

When people talk about cross-linking, it would help if I knew exactly what kind of cross-linking you're talking about. Are you talking about ROS links? Links from the main page? Links from a links page? Links from a few deep content pages? Links embedded in content? All of the above (i.e. the SE doesn't care...a single cross link anywhere on each domain is enough to raise a flag)?

A reminder that the topic of this thread is not about how much cross-linking you can get away with. That should be another thread. This thread is about how to make cross-linking that's primarily intended for users safe, and, in that regard, caveman and ciml probably answered the question.

A follow up question, though, might be: are these techniques legit? Google clearly doesn't want networks of sites to dominate their serps, and I do understand their problem. So, might sites that "safely cross-link for users" really be trying to have their cake and eat it too... trying to pretend separation to permit overlapping serps?

How much cross linking? I assume it might be any degree of cross-linking. I could give you examples in client sites I've seen that have ranged from...
- two related sites sharing only one link each (ie, one reciprocal link).
- 50 sites with a corporate links page on each site that linked to each one of the 50, but that was the only cross-linking.
- a half-dozen sites cross-linking to each other on every page.
- a half-dozen sites cross-linking only from corporate links pages and some home pages.

It turns out, in my experience anyway, that the sites that don't cross-link a whole lot for users are the ones that aren't trying to game the engines either. ROS (Run Of Site) links are immediately suspect. There quickly arise some shades of grey, though, as some real-world separate brands of related products do end up overlapping in serps somewhat.

I think separation of hosting, separation of inbound link sources, separation of search terms, the competivity of search terms, and the insulation of the sites directly from each other are all interrelated.

My concern in this thread is primarily with this last point, because there are clients who like corporate identity to be shared among brands. Google has been variable enough on this lately that I'd just prefer to keep sites as separate as possible. I'd like to do it legitimately, though I suppose even that could be seen as manipulation. ;)