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The problem is that the Google algo based on Page Rank was based on the way the WWW tended to be many years ago. Domains were expensive, $70 for 2 years to Internic. Now, domains can be had for $8 a year. And, hosting wasn't that cheap either. Not many people even had their own websites. And, people who did have websites usually had one, or maybe two. Because of this, extensive crosslinking of sites didn't tend to happen much naturally, and thus the Google algo was reasonably good for the WWW in those days.
However, times have changed. The underlying notion of links to other sites being a vote, and extensive crosslinking tending to be a dishonest attempt to "stuff the ballot box", no longer applies. People now often have many domains, and crosslinking them is done out of simple vanity. And, people now link to other's sites for reasons other than they think they have substantial merit. In wealthier neighborhoods, I've gotta figure that lots of kids in high school now have their own websites. And, many are probably linking to as many friends and classmates sites as they know about, simply because this seems natural. However, Google will see all these kids sites linking to each other as something to penalize. For $19.64 a month, I can host up to *100* different domains if I've got them. And, as this 100 domain package was actually mainly intended for resellers, if I wanna play website host for family and friends who own their own domain names, I can. All I have to do is set up their domain in the online control panel, send them the passwords and voila, I have their domain online. As typically vanity sites of the sort family and friends tend to have will use very little bandwidth, cost wouldn't be a concern to me.
But, would it seem surprising that these friends and family members whose domains I host for free wouldn't out of gratitude link to at least some of my sites? Or, that I wouldn't have a page on at least one of my sites where I link to every family member and friend whose site I happen to host? And, this would be a *natural* way of extensive crosslinking of sites to happen, without it being done by people who have studied the Google algo and are trying to inflate Page Rank.
As such, if Google is penalizing just based on crosslinking without manually looking for intent to manipulate SERPs, this is going to result in a *lot* of collateral damage, and with increasing frequency. This is not a good thing. IMO, Google needs to revise their algo, or at least how they deal with penalties. Such as rather then penalize all the sites with a PR0, just ignore the related site's links, and base PR on links from unrelated sites.
Seriously, my experience is that moderate cross-linking is not a problem.
If there is a cross-linking penalty, then I think it must be confined to those sites which form a closed loop, i.e., no significant backlinks from websites outside the loop. I am the poster child for cross-linking (and have been since BEFORE Google was a twinkle in S&L's eyes) and my sites (40 themed domains, thousands of pages, individual content) do well on google ...PR5's & 6's.
So, say that hypothetical group of high school students is trading links among themselves, for 10 of that group those links are essentially all they have. But the other two have actual useful and interesting information on their sites, so people from outside this closed circle also link to those sites. Chances are those two sites wouldn't suffer while the others will.
So is there a loss to the searcher? Not really. Google is the most popular search engine for searchers in the know because it produces, in most cases, the most relevant results. There are so many websites that even if a few are missing from the results because of penalties or glitches in the algorithm or whatever, to the searcher it makes no difference.
Is it unfair? Nope. It's a judgement calculated to bring about relevant results. It's no more unfar than is scoring high for keyword proximity or for title tags. Every site can't be ranked #1, or even on the first serp. Every approach to ranking is going to seem "unfair" to the people who it leaves at the bottom of the listing. The key if you want your site to rank well is to understand the system as it is, and work within it. And again, evidence shows that search engine users feel that Google produces relevant results with the approach they're using.
I am researching a VERY competitive area, and am finding that nearly all of the top ten sites have extensive crosslinks, and that nearly all are from the same, or in some cases from two class c blocks. If *I* can find them, Google can find them.
My favorites are the sites made up to look like directories, but are in reality glorified hallway pages pointing to pages of every search phrase they can find - and all registered to the same company - not hidden in any way. Google has no problem with these... I think I would.
In many cases the sites were indeed based on different but unrelated content, but were by no means mirror sites with keywords swapped out. And due to the nature of the main sites, all these mini sites were in fact "on topic".
I would not depend too much on these tactics for ranking, because at the click of a mouse, everything changes.. and *flush* there goes your links. But for now, my last day or so of research tells me Google doesn't care much at all.
- All on 1 dedicated server
- unconcerned with C classes
- whois correct, showing all the same owner
- "universal" copyright graphic & link to owner's "About" page
By 2000, the crosslinking and linking to other websites (other resources and also sponsors) had become so complex that I had to integrate a directory system to manage them. I used two supposedly certain death stopwords when naming it (links and directory) --the directory itself (which is one level below root) has a PR of 6.
I do believe in the automatic PR0 (and 'reduced PR') penalties, but not as you describe. Most people with Google related problems do not have these penalties; some people think they do because they don't see the real problem.
So, you are saying that my hypothetical of 10 high school kids linking to all their other friends sites is something that wouldn't get clobbered by either an automatic, or manual Google penalty?
That's what I'd say. I'd say they'd all have a deserved extremely low PageRank. And seven of them would be here asking why they were "penalized." :)
I'm with ciml on this:
I do believe in the automatic PR0 (and 'reduced PR') penalties, but not as you describe. Most people with Google related problems do not have these penalties; some people think they do because they don't see the real problem
I believe that some sites are penalized. Especially in the case of "reduced PR" penalties, though, I think that the majority are cases where the site's pages have the PageRank they are supposed to have. I'm not commenting on your site at all, because I don't know the specifics, but there are a lot of sites where there's nothing surprising about a PR3 on the index page and a 1 or zero on the various internal pages. Not every low PR is the result of a penalty.
As for the ten kids who link to each other and nowhere else, with noone else linking to them...I'd worry about that.
I wouldn't be at all squeamish about crosslinking two domains. I am careful about what I do with the 70+ domains I have that link together (it's a geographical thing, most are within a sparse area of 100,000 population), but two doesn't seem to be a problem (I'd suggest that 3 doesn't seem to be, but I'm too much of a coward to say so).
As for the ten kids who link to each other and nowhere else, with noone else linking to them...I'd worry about that.
But isn't this a scenario that is not also quite reaonable to exist today, but likely will become increasingly more common as time goes on? And, what if someone with a PR6 page links to one of these kids?
Yes, but the ten kids have no PageRank anyway. The amusing thing abuot the PR penalties is that (in some cases) they penalise strategies that just don't work. As Chris_R puts it, there's no PageRank perpetual motion machine.
Since the automatic penalty was relaxed, it seems to be easier to get a penalty by linking to a 'bad neighbourhood' than it is to create one. So...
> what if someone with a PR6 page links to one of these kids?
The balance of opinion seems to be that [s]he'd be OK. If that page had few or no other links then maybe it's time to worry, but there wouldn't be much PageRank to penalise anyway. Personally, if the kids had a penalty I'd rather not link them from my home page.
Yes, but the ten kids have no PageRank anyway. The amusing thing abuot the PR penalties is that (in some cases) they penalise strategies that just don't work. As Chris_R puts it, there's no PageRank perpetual motion machine.
Is this in fact true the way Google calculates PageRank?
Sticky mail me for a good example.
Put in a gradual Pagerank factored discount on the interlinking links (not a fixed and final penalty)directly proportional to the level of interlinking(percentage and Pagerank wise).
Situations:
1. Ten classmates sites all fully interlinked. No other outbound links from all ten sites. One of the sites has an inbound external link (otherwise none of them turn up in Google).
Result: The one classmate's site with the inbound external link has his inherited Pagerank. The rest all have zero Pagerank (as interlinking is 100%). The Pagerank zero is not a penalty, its just the value. All sites can still be found in Google. All links lead the visitor to where the classmates want. No harm, no penalty, no pain, no extensive gain.
2. SEO spammer setting up 20 sites with blue-widgets, yellow-widgets etc.sites.
For some reason, he luckily gets half of them into DMOZ, the other half get some other external inbound links making them all relatively "independant". Now the interlinking part. The grand-webmaster is careful and only interlinks 40% of his outgoing external links of his 20 informative sites together and is happy because he seems to pass the Google no-penalty exam.
Result: The grand-webmaster is being informative with 60% of his outgoing links on his 20 sites by pointing/voting to other really independant sites/pages. However 40% of his links are all incestuously pointing into the same direction. With the above suggested discount factor (lets say 1,8), . Google puts the directly proportionate 40% discount on the value of these (inter)links and multiplies this by the discount factor 1,8. That is, the links still count, but only for 28% (100% - 1,8 x 40%) of their original value. Alternatively be less severe and treat the interlinking links as true internal links, the sites seemingly are so heavily on topic with each other, the poor webmaster just forgot to make one site out of his whole collection.
3. One company setting up mycomany.com, mycompany.de, mycompany.fr etc.
No SEO effect intended, the company is a true multi-national with local language versions of their products on every site (Nokia e.g.). The webmaster wants to be helpful and interlinks the sites by about 50% of his outgoing external links, intending to help surfers to other language versions of his products.
Result: The different local language versions of this multi-national get very little Pagerank or ranking benefit from the interlinking. But that was not the intention of the webmaster. He/she just wanted to possibly help the surfer towards other language versions of his products. (remember the original funtion of links?). I would argue that the a better discount factor for this case would be counting the external interlinking inter-company links as equal to internal links within one site. (that way you treat multinationals with one multi-lingual site equal to multi tld sites).
4. Two totally independant sites decide to do a reciprocal link because they believe they belong to a similar community and would help each other by passing each other possible visitors. Both sites are normal informative sites. Nothing special, each have 50 outgoing external links througout their site.
Result: Google detects an interlinking. However this is 1/50 th = 2% of the total links. The applied proportional discount is 2% times 1,8 = 3.6% or negligable and rightly so.
One could argue about the discount being proportional or the real value of the factor. But something to this effect (if feasable) should be put into place by Google?
Or putting it this way, I would not feel a proud benefactor towards the web-community if I would set up 20 sites for SEO purposes of my business, I would feel cheap and I would categorise it as a waste of time in real life values. Sadly, as of now, looking at Google results, if done well it does get you better rankings within Google.
I suppose everyone agrees? ;)
But isn't this a scenario that is not also quite reaonable to exist today,
It does exist today very often in the blogging community. Bloggers love to interlink.
I've had my blog/journal/thing for nearly a year and the first six months or so were just like this, a bunch of my friends and I interlinking each other, as well as to and from a central page. Some of us had other incoming links but not many. There were a few outgoing links from the system but again not many. None of us were penalised but then none of us had high page ranks either. And it didn't matter. Because like the ten kids, the only people we read or who read us were on the links list. In this case the interlinking was more important than the google ranking (although we still like the amusing google hits we occasionally get).
Since then things have changed, many of us have bought domains and are in the process of setting up "proper" websites with real information. Therefore real page rank and SERP's are appearing along with more outgoing links as we find other interests. Crosslinking may become a problem although the new links are diluting it out to some extent.
However while it was a more closed system, it worked fine.
Shelley
If you put a link on a page(s) just for the sake of placing a crosslink between sites, where no added value is provided for visitors to actually cross from one site to the other... (e.g. the same thing under a different domain name) this generally means you are, only attempting to trick the bot.
In this case, you are SPAM and IMHO deserve the penalty and removal from the archive.
Instead of bot trickery, define crosslinking by visitor value, you can't go wrong here. Not by Googlebot, Googleyes or any other referral for that matter.
