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I have four sites, each of them has a link to the other three but also has links to other sites not owned by me. Two of the sites have links to each other on around 150 of the 500 pages of each site. All the links are either graphical or anchored text. Is this crosslinking and will Google penalise my site for it?
InternetHeaven
Will Google penalize for it? Unfortunately only Google knows for sure as there are no hard and fast rules for what amount of crosslinking will trip the spam filters.
Generally, if I am going to crosslinking between multiple sites, I try and do it in as few places as possible and also make sure that I link off to other quality sites as well so that your network doesn't stand out.
Unfortunately, it's a little sad that we have to figure this in as often links betwen a network of sites is not for PR reasons but for usability.
A good way around this problem is to have only a few links that are actual links, and the rest written through JS which Google won't pickup. This gives your visitors the usability, but won't look so strange to Google.
