Forum Moderators: open
My question:
Each site has about 200-300 pages and every one has a footer (very visible) with a link to all the other 11 sites/external-domains, i would not assume that this would be a problem but now i have recently found this forum and see the word crosslinking floating around, could this be the reason for my sudden drop in ranking?
thanks
colin
A model for crosslinking would be for each site to be 100% unique and only crosslink on a few pages of the site, not all.
So basically all these sites that i have, cannot promote each other linkwise?
is there a thread explaining crosslinking exactly?
Colin
Really? yaaiks, I just finished about 500 pages crosslinking my other sites. Was just about to sit back and watch the results of that efford.
Personally, if I came across that type of crosslinking on a site, I would turn them in to Google and let them decide whether or not it is spam in their eyes and is there any real benefit being added to the user.
"Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone. We think that's a bad thing."
Furthermore, the checkboxes for the type of spamming lists:
Hidden text or links
Misleading or repeated words
Page does not match Google's description
Cloaked page
Deceptive redirects
Doorway pages
Duplicate site or pages
Other (specify)
Please explain to me where it says that "crosslinking" constitutes "spam". Personally I think excessive crosslinking may degrade a sites ranking, but I do not understand why you call it spam.
i have 12 websites which run under completely different domains but are all about the same topic
I have to admit, the content is not unique for each site.
cross linking these pages with the info he gave me, thats what i call most likely spaming and worth reporting if i found one of my competitors doing this
Agreed, however the person who began this thread did not do it properly.
--I have to admit, the content is not unique for each site.--
They did it strictly to gain favor with the search engine.
That is spam by Google's own definition, so if I found it I certainly would report it and let Google deal with it.
Cross linking has been discussed a lot here. There is a valid reason for it and then there is also those who do it just to gain rank.
I know spam is a touchy subject on this board, but there is no fine line.
From the original post, this appears to be spam.
When you say different countries, do mean all english speaking countries or not?
I have different domains for certain countries uk/france/germany etc,
the theme is the same for each site but you cannot buy the same widget in france that you can in uk, hence the different sites.
If a german visitor lands by chance on the uk page and sees something he likes, at the bottom of the page is the link to the german site telling him/her where they can buy the widget in germany. If the link was not there, they would never know.
It seems common sense to put the links there, but beause i was not totally sure if this was spamming because i started to see bad references to crosslinking on this forum and because my pages suddenly dropped in rank to 4-5 results page i decided to ask you guys.
I dont understand why i should be penalized, but hey, another few sleepless nights puttin it right.
Follow up question: if i remove all the crosslinks, next time google comes by will they put me back in the positions i was before, give or take a few places?
thanks
colin
I have different domains for certain countries uk/france/germany etc,
the theme is the same for each site but you cannot buy the same widget in france that you can in uk, hence the different sites.
Do you mean each site had pages with text in different languages? If so, I donīt think that what you described is spam.
I have different domains for certain countries uk/france/germany etc, the theme is the same for each site but you cannot buy the same widget in france that you can in uk, hence the different sites
Now, if your sites should at this point already been penalized, of which I'm not convinced, then I would suppose this is rather from the the sites in the same language. Might be an issue of duplication then.
Sounds like you're selling hotels. I have seen sites like yours DOMINATING the SERPS for years and we have always resisited the "link farm" strategy. We thought it would come to an end with a bang one day.
If you really didn't know what you were doing wrong then you deserve sympathy. Somehow I doubt it though with the speed you found this forum straight after your relegation.
This strategy is not always legitimate. In my experience the reason the sites are interlinked is often (nearly always) to promote pagerank - especially in the tourist industry. The navigational advantage is usually minimal for sites in different locations unless they are just in different language versions and somehow the user has stumbled upon the wrong version. I'd wager the only users following the links are the SE spiders.
Most often each site has it's own geographical DMOZ/Yahoo listing to get a decent pagerank and then they swap pagerank between each other, often linking every single page to all the other sites.
Is it spam? I don't know, but I know it's not done for the human readership....
Slydog, i found this forum 10 minutes after i found my sites dropped, simply because i needed to know if i violated the rules and made a kw search for "spamming google", search results? top of page "webmasterworld forums" oh my....
mind you, being as stupid as i look, i should have checked this before i built the sites!
colin
Sideeffects? A new member comes here asking for assistance and opinions, and gets outright suspected.
Pay heed: That's important advice.
If you've had a ranking drop and you're not sure why, it might simply be that the algorithm has shifted a bit and you're not strong enough in areas that it's favouring this time round. You haven't necessarily done anything "wrong".
The way to proceed is to keep working on the things that we know Google likes - original content, quality links, well-structured pages, lean clean code.
SlyGuy, by your logic every international organisation are nothing but a bunch of spammers. Sorry and no offence meant, but this whole spam discussion is getting more ridiculous and hysterical by the day.
No offence taken :) - Isn't the discussion getting rediculous because the spam is getting rediculous? I've seen one guy with 80 domains to cover a single topic. He's a member of this forum.
I know you are a big proponent of local TLDs, and like anything else, that's fine in moderation. If you use them all in local language, no problem. If you use them just for a local branch of a multinational, no problem. But when you add 50 links to the bottom of every page of your site which are loaded with keywords to your other domains, to say this is for user navigation is stretching the bounds of credibility.
Sorry, Colinf if I was unwelcoming. I guess your site structure is just a little too close to home for me. I see sites like yours rocking in the SERPs and I get a hard time from my partner because I refuse to go down that road. He thinks I am too cautious, and the discussion gets a little heated sometimes. Sorry if I took it out on you.
"Sounds like you're selling hotels"
Sounds like you hit the nail on the head. Thousands upon thousands of mainly affiliate link / driven sites named country-hotels-discounts-reservations.con (and the 15 other permutations of that same spam domain), all crosslinked are actually killing the industry. If you fancy some bacon and all you get served is Hormel, then you go to another restaurant. And if these guys are allowed to continue unreigned, people will simply stop using the net to look around.
I hope GG will get rid of a bucket load of these guys after he took my report / complaint. I just hope Google will fine tune their algo to get rid of the rest of these Pork Luncheon Meat purveyors.
heini
What do you serve up for breakfast in your household, and is that why you jumped in so?
For instance, if user clicks on one of your hotels-in-country-discount-reservations.com sites you're talking about, and they find a hotel and book a reservation, what's the problem? So what if the site is affiliate link driven? The customer got what they wanted, didn't they?
If you have a content site and you're being beaten by affiliates, look at what they're doing and emulate it. If you can't beat them, join them! If you have good content _and_ you adopt a few "spammy" tactics which are working well for the affiliates, you should be able to do that much better, and you also get customer loyalty for your good content.
Instead of complaining about spam, spend time working on your site.
To address the original question, seems to me that if this is indeed getting penalized, then just point the links at the bottom of the page to one page on that site which has "related sites in other countries" or something like that. Then link to the other sites only from this page. That way, you have one page which links to all other sites, which benefits from pagerank bonus from all your content pages, and you don't have crosslinking on all pages.
Even if you are drawing some kind of penalty for having crosslinks on all your pages, it seems very unlikely that you will be penalized for linking to all your other sites from only one page. So this way you get the benefit to users and avoid the crosslinking problem.
The problem is that they put what search engines consider to be relevant content. In reality, what they do is put generic meaningless pages about, say, culture or dances. There is absolutely no qualitive nature to what they put. Where real sites, in this context, add qualitive information is by visiting the hotels and doing reviews, etc. Unfortunately, this is not seen as broad and desirable by search engines as the the generic Spam pages on dances, culture, etc.
This kills large "real" reservations sites. As we have no space for these pages (really) - we run other sites for this purpose. So, an affiliate site run by someone who has never been to the destination, has a few hotels offered by affiliate companies, buys a few spam domains, puts generic related pages up, uses the same basic template and graphics, cross links them all, and runs link exchanges is winning the day.
If that is good, I am a horse's worst feature.
Sure, you get real content by going to the destination, but you also have to have whatever content it is that people are searching for in the SEs, otherwise they'll never find the meat. Give 'em both, I say!
What exactly is a "real" reservations site, anyway? One on which you can make real reservations?
Like a javascript link, or something funky in a dynamic page that google can't follow (it still can't right?)
Colin
