Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I know a lot of people here have probably had great success with automated reciprocal linking, but speaking personally I think that setup is somewhat corrupt.
Many people have mentioned their anger and frustration at seeing worthless spam rise to prominence at their expense, and surely linking for sheer search placement is one technique that has encouraged the proliferation of rubbish.
Visitors don't want to find spam, when they find it I think it hurts Google/Yahoo, and it also hurts the general perception regarding the www.
So it seems reasonable that sooner rather than later the SEs will increasingly discount, if not effectively punish, careless link exchanges that don't facilitate the end users' experience or otherwise actually enhance the SEs set of "knowledge."
My main concern regarding linking more solidly then is that very few people are interested in non-automated and thoughtful linking, let alone one-way linking.
It might seem to be easier in some cases to create other related sites, on other ips, and link these to you in one direction, incrementally, to achieve a more organic effect.
But even without interlinking, this could still come out the other end looking like a "mini-network" and carry a penalty.
Does anyone have any experience with linking in a "daisy-chain" like manner, leaving just one break in the chain to avoid a full circle?
And does anyone have any ideas on how much value any single site can pass on in links to another site?... To me it seems like it would just be a portion of the PR of each page, but perhaps beyond a certain number of links the overall effect could be dampened.
Ultimately, each site may only be able to "vote" once for any other site using a particular anchor text.
Prairie.
Agreed the penalty (through downgraded importance) should occur if it hasn't already (Topic Sensitive Pagerank / Local Rank).
As to the value one site can offer another I look at it from the perspective of buying links (not that I do), but at least to say if I was I would only pay for one link, maybe two from the same c class. I base this on comments from more experienced webmasters in forums like this one and accept the logic.
In terms of a daisy chain that didn't link up (fully - the last link in the circle) - I think that would work well if the page title also carried the keyword phrase.
Have you considered doing this:
site a links to b & d
site b links to c & d
site c links to d
site d (the real page you want to rank)
If you are serious about linking with long term goals in mind, then don't do it.
Dominic_X ... the method you outline seems safe to me. The end result is something that might come about naturally, so long as all of the sites had unique content and hosting, and some relevant inbound links themselves, it should be ok.
I'm certainly no expert but it *seems* like such a setup would give reliable and good ranking on terms which aren't majorly competitive.
At the very least site "d" should do well -- the day when you can harm a ranking by linking to it is the day I give up on this.
My suspicion is that it would work better in Google than in Yahoo at present. I did have one site fall out of Yahoo this week which had been steady at #2 for about 2 years and was not cross-linked, but linked out mostly to another two sites. One of these sites has assumed its previous #2 position, at least for now.
Martinibuster -- by "beware the daisy chain", are you including a chain with a broken link?
Prairie.
...beware the daisy chain", are you including a chain with a broken link?
Absolutely. Go to touchgraph to see how easy it is to map networks of sites. It is naive to think you can hide behind unique ips.
There are many valid reasons to link websites together, but link popularity is NOT one of them. At the end of the day you will have to seek out differentiated backlinks for many if not most of them.
The largest, broadest network of sites would seem to be the most artificial.
If relevance is more important than PR, the safest linking would seem to be the most restricted and most specific, where there is a large distance between blue widgets and red widgets.
What you assume or deduce or reason about interlinking has nothing to do with the reality of what has been happening for years and in the recent past.
Do a search for Cross Linking Penalty [google.com] and read. It's one of the most basic newbie screw-ups, up there with hidden text.
Interlinking for link popularity is not a viable long term strategy.
Be aware.
Where does site A get it's theme, relevancy and "importance" to pass on to site B? Where does site B get the same? And so on.
As MB said, this isn't a solid long term linking strategy. This is called creating a network of interlinked sites (crosslinking) which is easily mapped and easily destroyed.
