Hub and spoke approach

Why less risky than crosslinking?

[blaize]

I am wondering why the hub and spoke approach is considered to be less risky than crosslinking.

In the hub and spoke approach, a single site (the hub) is getting a huge boost in PR from a large number of sites owned by the same company. I don't understand why Google wouldn't consider this to be unnatural linking. It seems to me that crosslinking between a handful of sites would actually be *more* natural than the hub and spoke method, because in the latter case, a single site is getting a much greater PR due to the linkage than would be the case with interlinking a small handful of sites.

[vitaplease]

blaize,

maybe you can clarify a bit more what you mean:

In the hub and spoke approach, a single site (the hub) is getting a huge boost in PR from a large number of sites owned by the same company

[blaize]

I'm terribly sorry for the lack of clarity in my initial post.

It was my understanding that a hub is a site that links out to a large number of sites within ones own network (in addition to external sites relevant to the theme), and that all the individual sites which are listed on the hub link back to the hub, but do not link to each other.

Perhaps I have misunderstood the hub and spoke concept?

[vitaplease]

As far as I understand hubs, a good hub is a site generally linking out to good (independant - and not network internal) authorities.

Hubs are generally directories. DMOZ is an excellent example of that.

An excellent hub will get links towards it from many independant sources, for being an outstanding starting point to find selected independant authorities.

A directory only getting back-links from the sites it links to, will not qualify as a special hub. It might amass some pagerank, if all the sites it links to have earned their own independant back-links and pass some of that back towards the "hub".

[europeforvisitors]

In the hub and spoke approach, a single site (the hub) is getting a huge boost in PR from a large number of sites owned by the same company. I don't understand why Google wouldn't consider this to be unnatural linking.

Google may well consider such linking to be unnatural when all the sites are owned by one company. The problem for Google is how to distinguish between "natural" links to a hub and "unnatural" linking of the type that you describe.

With ordinary crosslinking, the linking pattern itself is unnatural. That isn't the case with inbound links to a hub.