Webrings and Google

Would Google punish Webring Navbars?

[lbobke]

I maintain quite a few large Webrings.
They drive quite a bit of traffic to my sites as well as most of the other members'.

Now, for some of the rings, I created a homepage of their own with information regarding the scope of the respective ring its forums, inclusion criteria and any other ring-specific information.

The ring home page would be located on one of my main domains, usually with hardly any links to and from my main site.
However, there would be a link on the navigation bar of the ring to the homepage.
Now, except for the user-ID, the Navbar is just about the same on every user site. This means, there could be several hundred code fragments which are almost identical.

Could Google mistake this for a deliberate spamming attempt? I read somewhere here that they are now watching out for repetitive code?

Would it be better to move all the homepages to a domain (or free site) of their own?

On the other hand, many large sites have the same navigation menu on every page. I can't see how this would be "punishable"?!

Laurenz

[jeremy goodrich]

I wouldn't worry about a webring being a sole reason for a penalty - those have been around for ages, and are a great help to people looking to surf a set of topic specific websites.