Is it link farm?

I have a couple of interlinked sites...

[Janis_K]

Hi,

I have 3 websites which are interlinked (there are links in side menu on every page to both other sites). I did not intend it to be a spam technology. At first I had one site but them I wanted to broaden topic of my site and It seemed logical to get new domains and iterlink them.

Question: Does Google consider it as spam? At the moment I receive lots of traffic from G and I'd really hate to get banned.

If Google might cosider it as spam what should I do? If I remove these links logical navigation of my sites will fall apart.

Thank you for your advice,
Janis

[Yidaki]

It's all relative. What's a link farm in your eyes?

- Example 1: Jane has a bird, a ferret, a cat and a husband. She calls her home a "farm".
- Example 2: Joe has a nice aquarium with three fishes. He'd never call his home "a farm", though.
- Example 3: Ole McDonald has 250 sheep, and 10.000 chicken. He calls his home "a farm".

Now, who's the real farmer?

Stuff to read about: what is a link farm [google.com]

Welcome [webmasterworld.com] to WebmasterWorld, Janis_K. ;)

[bzprod]

How old are the sites? How does google currently rank them?

-Julian

[Janis_K]

to Julian :

1st site, 2.5 years (PR5)
2nd site, 1.5 years (PR5)
3rd site, 3 months (PR5)

About PR of 3rd site I'm not sure because toolbar data might be misleading.

to Yidaki :

Thank you for link. There were some useful topics but I'm still not sure what should I do about this. Some people say it is ok, if you do it for logical reason and not for PR, some say it is still risky...

regards,
Janis

[FleaPit]

It's not a problem... at all

[rfgdxm1]

Crosslinking every page on every site to the other 2 sites sure does seem spammy. However, this sort of thing does happen often enough in the real world by webmasters without any intent of spamming. From all the evidence I have seen from real world sites, nobody has ever got whacked for what you are doing by automatic filters. The automatic filter threshold appears higher. Thus, the issue is whether your sites could pass muster in a hand check, or if someone at Google would give you the Google Death Penalty after seeing what you are up to?

[aaronjf]

While it may come across, and it is debatable, as spammy like tactics. Don't sweat it. For a year I had 11 sites, all theatrical in nature, cross linking to one another. Each site had a list of links to my other sites at the bottom of every page. I never saw a problem with Google, except for one thing.

The problem was this. Let say I have sites named widgets-widgets1, widgets-widgets2, so on and so forth on up to widgets4. When a user ran a search for widgets 4, widgets sites 1 - 3 showed up in the search. Even though other than the link they were not related - except in very general terms. Google was seeing them as relevant because they all had widgets4 on at the bottom of every page of ever site in the anchor text. Now 1 - 3 would never rise above 4 for a search for widgets4, but they would be there. Some times all lumped together on the first page.

I noticed this because people would show up on widgets1 looking for widgets4. After I realized why this was happening I stopped doing it. Instead I opted to put all the links for my sites in a special box at the top of my links page for every site. Now, to some degree widgets1 -3 do still show up in a search for widgets 4 just by having the anchor text on the links page. However, they are pretty far back there. I also do not see this happening with sites that are much more competitive. Say a search for widgets4 produces 2 million returns, widgets1 - 3 would not show up till way way in the back. But, if a search for widgets1 returns only 100,000 returns, you very well might still see widgets2 - 4 show up, but on the third or fourth page - depending on their PR values.

The simple answer to your question is, "don't worry about it." Google does not consider cross linking to yourself a spam. There are just to many legitimate reasons to cross link for it to be spam, i.e. while widgets1 - 4 are all different from each other - they are all still widgets and a related but different.

[twilight47]

Hey, if the links are visible and understandable, then I don't see how Google could consider it spam.
There are many sites that crosslink using hidden links and Google gives them high PR for having so many backlinks, if they penalized someone for just having regular links that would be rotten.

[Janis_K]

Thank you guys,
You've made me feel much better! :)

regards,
Janis

[Excessus]

As a web design company we have more than 50 customers that are linked through us, and to us. Most of them are doing great in Google and so do we, so no problems at all :)