Reciprocal Link Lists

One page posted at many sites. Penalized?

[DeWhite]

Suppose you have different sites that agree to all link to one another and create a standard list. Each site then posts this list on their links page. Thus we have a number of pages which are all (close to) being the same.

Do any of the search engines penalize this arrangement? (If the number of participatents makes a difference assume around 100.)

In view of the latest happening on Google, does this arrangement do any good at all wrt Google ranking? How about the other search engines?

[martinibuster]

What happens is that the chain becomes like a barrier that won't let the bot leave because it keeps bouncing up against another member of the chain and never leaves the group. It can be detected.

[DeWhite]

Thanks martinibuster,

I can see what you mean by the chain and that it can be detected. I'm not trying to hide anything. There are just a group of us in the same industry who want to build up our sites PR. I believe, from my reading, that reciprocal links don't help as much as they have in the past, but think that they may still help some. However, I have also been told that this particular way of using the reciprocal links might, in fact, be detrimental rather than helping. Thus my question.

[martinibuster]

The scenario you describe has a legitimate purpose apart from building PR. A better purpose.

Businesses often prosper when they are located near competitors. The more competitors the more success they tend to find. The location becomes a destination for that kind of product and people will tend to think of a certain town when they want to buy, wine, gloves, holiday ornaments, pumpkins, etc. It's a proven economic phenomena.

If you want to improve your PR, all of you have to concentrate on getting those inbounds. There's lots of good threads in this forum, including in the Library.

But linking up all of your related sites after all of your group has diversified their backlinks sounds like a cool strategy/experiment for creating an online destination for similar products.

[neuron]

msg #:1 describes a "linking scheme", something frowned upon by the search engines.

However, in msg #:3 you describe this as an "industry specific list", which means it should be actually quite helpful to link to these sites and receive links from them too (not necessarily in that order), but I would recommend that you edit the list, perhaps add a few more sites to it, remove the bottom 10% of lowest quality, and that you edit the anchors and descriptions to make them original. I know that's a lot more work than cut-n-paste, but doing so is likely to keep you out of trouble in the event someone calls the spam police on you.

There are many examples of sites that have banded together to link to each other and later suffered because of that linking alliance. I don't mean that they were "penalized". What I mean is that the sites would gain ranking because of this linking alliance, only for them later to be ID'd by the algo as link schemers and subsequently discounted to the point that the sites gain nothing from the scheme, reverting to whatever ranking they would have had had they not engaged in such an alliance in the first place.

[DeWhite]

Thanks martinibuster and neuron

Your answers make me feel better about the project and you've both pointed out some aspects I hadn't though of.