Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Why do I ask? Most of my colleagues agree that one should not interlink their own sites - even when it makes sense from the user's perspective. For some reason, there is a stigma that the SEs may frown upon networks run by the same person/company. Do you believe this to be true?
I bring this up because I was at an IAC site (CitySearch) and they had listed all of their related - and non-related - websites in the footer. They seemed not to be suffering any ill-affect by this interlinking (and all had solid PR8's to boot). Why should I worry about doing the same - especially if it benefits my users? Can anyone present a solid argument for me not to engage in this seemingly logical approach to interlinking?
What's from stopping me from interlinking all of my Florida Keys websites... the Boogeyman?
And these were nasty, heavy penalties that took the grace of GoogleGuy (who said I had managed to create my own bad neighbourhood!) and many e-mails to the 'plex before they were lifted. Well over a year before things were back to normal.
I moaned back then that sites like about.com were cross-linking like crazy, between many unrelated topics and getting away with it - but it seems there is a different rule for the "big guys" out there.
I suggest interlinking only a few sites and in a very natural way, varying the link text on the sites...
Look at #*$! and the rotating "advertising" in the footer there. Seems to work fine. No worries there although I do recall Googleguy saying something about footer links being seen as spam.
again its a "who knows" situation
(edit: woohoo im a full member)
That should be fine.
If, on the other hand, you had 10-15 foobar webdesign sites and linked them together on every index page of every website, then that could cause problems.
Anyway, I am unsure if Google is still as hard on that type of cross-linking these days... it was about three years ago now.
Hehe. Well, they can't know what your definitions of valid interlinking and spam interlinking are, but they have their definitions of spam interlinking, and you can count on them being able to identify it when it exists.
Problem is, you don't know what their definition of spam interlinking is, any more than they know yours. ;-)
Right! Too often people act like there is a clear definition when there is NOT. Google should and will take many things into account when evaluating linking patterns, and sometimes they'll make the wrong assumptions about your site.
I do wish there was more "linking" guidance at the G. Guidelines because "users" vary and my idea of what users like may be different from yours.
One person's spam is another's "great thought of the day".
Advise slow intergration .. 1000 links to a site coming in wil more than likely be frowned apon.
Nail, meet head.
>>>"would you do this linking if there was NO effect on your search rankings?"
If you can answer this question 100% honestly then I'd say go for it. But, at the same time - if the cross linking is really being done for a "user experience" why not make the link unreadable by the engines and not try and gain backlink credit for it to be safe if you're really worried.
>>>cross-linking has been known to cause websites to rank poorly
Cross linking must be done with care. It is definitely not something to be done by a novice. I really think that the key to getting hit or not comes from the "whole picture" - as tedster mentioned.
>>>No, it is absolutely not true. My network is proof of it.
Just because your network gets away with it doesn't make the "potential of a penalty by cross linking" non existant. Some spam sites survive in the serps for years - I wouldn't say spam doesn't get penalized as a result.
>>>SE spammers rely on interlinking to get their rankings
I don't know many anymore who are relying on this. It is a method that can be used, but I wouldn't call it something "SE spammers rely on".
>>>if you link to sites that do not relate to your content
Google is not going to kill a site about widgets because it has a link to a page about oranges. Now, if your 20 page site has 100 outbound links to sites about oranges, apple and pears and 5 to sites about widgets - that could cause an issue, IME.
>>>>>>Just because your network gets away with it >>>>>>doesn't make the "potential of a penalty by >>>>>>cross linking" non existant. Some spam sites >>>>>>survive in the serps for years - I wouldn't say >>>>>>spam doesn't get penalized as a result
Our network has been in place for, in one form or another, for 6 years. In the beginning, I owned 91 websites, those are all but one gone, sold in a profit taking move.
52 of those orginal websites were related, in the exact same field, but unique different. It was like FORD having a site for each model, and all linked through the hub. How can you penalize a site like that? You can't. It is not spamming the engine, it is creating a better experience for the user. If I will never drive a pick-em-up truck, why should I have to weed through those on the Ford site? Answer, I shouldn't. It was the same for our site. Our domain names were very product specific. Had I wanted to create domain names for ranking reasons, I would not have chosen those names. That alone makes it clear it was a usability reason, not seo, or as you put it, spam.
Within that particular nitch, after we sold those 91, we had many design clients, and we promoted their sites. We promoted them from links on our new sites, but it was clear to anyone who cared to look, that we were all somehow related. My meta style was unmistakable, and I made no attempt to hide it.
Should the search engines penalize my clients, because I was a success in my industry, retired from it, and then taught many others how to do the same thing? No. Yes, each site had the calling card of my design style, and each had my designer linked logo at the bottom of the page. But, anyone with minimal whois knowledge could see we were different entities who had created our block party within a fine neighborhood.
Now, we use the same principle in our current network. We have a hub. That hub is very much nitch, albeit a very wide nitch, and it is very much related to the smaller sites.
The hub markets, to a different level of the supply chain, and in that respect is similar to the others. But, in one case markets to the next level of supply chain, naturally, in the brick and mortar end of the industry they overlap. It is the nature of the industry. I didn't create the overlap. It has always exist. So, yes, in some places,we overlap, within those two sites.
Some of those overlaps, rather than create duplicate content, we link to the content on the other site. But, there is one particular small set of pages, where that would take a visitor away from the site, and put them on the next supply level, if they surfed beyond it, and it that particular instance, they are very likely to do that.
If the supply line is going down, that is fine. If the supply line is going up, it is not fine. It would violate industry standards, in place since the beginning of the commerce on this planet. So, we avoid doing it, except in one case. Then...only because it is more right to do so, than not to. That all has nothing at all to do with SEO. It has everything to do with helping people find what they are looking for, and is the sole mission of Google, right after profits.
The smallest sites are finally tuned nitch sites, that target specific product lines, which are each a part of the hub.
SPAM? No.
We set up the network to send traffic to other sites in the network via outbound links. When we set it up, there was no PR tool bar. So, why would we setup a network based on something that hadn't been created yet. And if we had, we would have used our PR5 as the hub, not our PR4, and we very could have. From a usability point of view though, it made no sense. It was not a logical choice. But, I don't even think about PR. It is a visitor tool, and we take what we get.
I actually dread the idea we might someday be a PR8 because we will be hounded with link requests due to the high number of webmasters that visit our sites. I'm really hoping by then Google has abandoned the PR Tool bar. I have no intention of expanding my business beyond the family. I'm retired. When it gets too big for me, I will sell this one last business, and really call it quits. With the number of emails we get now from our visitors, asking us for things we have clearly said we don't do or have, I can't begin to imagine how we will filter and manage our email to avoid those PR link exchange requests.
Our mission was to stabilized traffic through natural links, when the engines ate too much sushi and vomited on our shoes. It was created to give some stablity to the traffic to the smaller sites. The network was setup as backup plan B to seo, not to enhance the smaller site's seo. As a matter of fact, my most popular small site, is the original site of the network, the one I started after selling the first network. Looking at it from a link SPAMMER point of view, it would have been the hub.
To this day, when I get an email to 'exchange' links with a site, I delete it. There has been one exception. If I had built my network as a way of trying to SPAM the engines into thinking that we were popular with many sites, I would have jumped on those link exchange requests. It is not very hard to see that, with a little checking. My inbound links are few. I have not based my network on inbound link growth, because it is way too time consuming, and in my opinion, not a good use of time resources, so it happends very slowly.
I really think you can look at a network, if you have been in this business any length of time at all, and tell the motives of the site owner. There is no way to program in to exclude networks, lest you leave out many fine networks, with good purposes. It is a case my case thing, hand editing.
You may want to reread my message - I never said cross linking was spam. What I said was that saying cross linking doesn't ever get penalized because one network (or three or four) didn't was *like* saying spam doesn't get penalized because a spam site (or 2 or 3 or 80) -utilizing blog spam, hidden text, whatever- surivives in the serps for an odd amount of time.
Google is not going to kill a site about widgets because it has a link to a page about oranges. Now, if your 20 page site has 100 outbound links to sites about oranges, apple and pears and 5 to sites about widgets - that could cause an issue, IME.
I am no sure that I can subscribe to this. Link relevance can really only be determined through the context of the page. Let's say that I have a travel site. This is clear enough I hear you say, travel sites all have similar content don't they? Well let's also surmise that on a destination guide on one of the pages in my site I could link to just about anything that takes place at or near this particular destination.
For example I could link to the local university site, the local hospital, a site about a famous artist who lived there, a site related to the impressionism that he/she was famous for. I could also link to the local bus timetable, a site about angling in the area and one about the carpet making that took place there in the last century. All of these are unrelated but completely relevant in the context of my hypothetical site. How is Google supposed to judge what is not related when relevant links can be so diverse?
They won't judge you on this, like you said, there is no way to tell if it is relevant or not. However, if you link to a bad neighborhood, this will create problems.
I was thinking more along the lines of - if the "quality" sites in your sector have most of their inbound and outbound links widget related - where you will look odd is if you only have a minority of widget links. Think along the line of "similar pages" - Google may not be able to determine relevance in the context that you gave an example with. But patterns and "usuals" are much easier to see.
Say I have a site about blue widgets. In the sidebar of every page of the site, I have a sidebar with links to my other web sites:
1) gadget directory (where widgets would be a type of gadget)
2) widget discussion forum (for all widgets)
3) widget cozies (add-on product for your widget)
For each of these, there is a valid reason for having a different web site for it. They're related, but different. Not everyone who has a blue widget will want a widget cozy, etc.
The reason to have that set-up on every page is not for the search engines, but rather for the user. I do not know from which page a user will enter the site. True, I could just put the links on the index page or some other "our other sites" page, but the user might not find it as easily as seeing it on the sidebar.
So, even though perhaps 90% of a page is unique content, if that sidebar is on every page of the site, the search engines will view that as link spam and penalize the site?
When it's really not link spam, but just a matter of making things easier for the user?
Gee, maybe linking to Google on every page of every one of my sites will cause Google to ban itself?
Now, if sidebar links like that can get a site penalized, what's to stop a competitor from setting up a web site with hundreds of pages, each with a set of links linking to YOUR site(s) to get you penalized and deprecated in the rankings?
I may have 50 or more cross links between the two sites, which in my book should not be a problem.
I set it up this way maily to keep the database domain seperate and to provide some redundancy for customers. If the member site goes down, I can post a message on the sales site or vice versa.
My whole business model is based upon cross linking to our network of sites all of which provide content, not just a bunch of Google ads.
