Triangular link exchanges

[grant]

I've been hearing talk about using a link strategy wherein A links to B, B links to C, and C links to A.

This is an effort to not have an obvious link exchange, and benefit the three parties trading links.

I presume google is smart enough to detect neighborhoods like this, but I'd like to hear some feedback.

Thanks!

[digitalghost]

That's a perfect link circle. I don't recommend that strategy.

[jeremy goodrich]

>>>I presume google is smart enough to detect neighborhoods like this, but I'd like to hear some feedback.

Try a search for "PR 0" or "link far" in Google, using advanced search. ;) The cries of woe from a thousand webmasters should be enough to dissuade you from such thoughts...

However, now - if you are going short to / forget about branding & longevity, who not do it & also do the following:

1) a bot that fake referrers to all three sites on blog sites, and others that leave log files open to be crawled
2) auto generate a good 100 pages or so in addition to the well crafted copy you got now
3) cloak the pages for Googlebot, based on user agent only.
4) add the "no archive" tag to all of them too.

That should get you started.

[rfgdxm1]

One question to the OP: how many links will be exchanged in this neighborhood? Amateur sites on the same topic frequently directly link to each other. Since they aren't competitors, no reason to care. Unless you are swapping links in large number for obvious PR manipulation purposes, you should be OK.

[grant]

There are about 15 companies in a similar manufacturing industry (non-competitive), who don't want to have recip links, but it seems that Google would penalize anyway.

I can see this is clearly not a way to go, and thanks for all the feedback!

[Eltiti]

One possible approach: Create an "industry directory" that links to the sites of all the participants, and have all participants link back to the directory.

[shady]

I have two sites - domain.com and domain.co.uk

Basically they are currently the same, except that the currencies used are USD on .com and GBP/EUR on domain.co.uk. I am likely to make other changes too, to offer more appropriate external deals to the UK/OS customers.

There are a large number of subdomains (1 for each or 1500 cities, worldwide) and I am considering placing a single link for each subdomain from .com to .co.uk and visa versa to offer the user their preferred currency.

In your opinions, is this also bad practice or should it be allowed due to its logical nature?

All help most gratefully received!

Best regards

[1milehgh80210]

Exchanging links is fine.
Automated or organized 'link exchanges' may not be.

[ukgimp]

>>I presume google is smart enough to detect
>>neighborhoods like this,

If those were the only links I could see a problem but if you have loads of other links out to different resources there is no way they could detect it on a large scale at the moment.

I got a funny response the other when I used the term

"linking loop"

I knew what I meant any how :)