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Crosslinking clarification

How important is relevance?

         

Finder

10:48 pm on Oct 1, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We are in the process of coding our own freely-available "widget builder". It has its own web page at www.hobbysite.com/widgetbuilder/ (Site A).

We are also in the process of actually building a widget with our widget builder. This widget is commercial in nature and has its own domain at www.ourwidget.com (Site B).

If I link A-->B as in, "Here is a widget we built." (along with links to anyone else who has done the same)

and link B-->A as in, "If you want to build your own, here is our free tool."

is this bad crosslinking? The sites are obviously highly relevant to each other, but we own both of them.

I am in the planning stages for Site B and, since we intend to make money from it, I am concerned about the site doing well.

ScottM

10:45 am on Nov 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I have had no problems in the past doing this.

Relevance to one another seems to be a good thing.

Beachboy

10:50 am on Nov 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I can't believe Google would penalize for that. Relevance (of one site's content to another) can't hurt but might not help. What is known to be critical where Google is concerned is the PageRank flowing from the Site A page to the Site B page (and vice-versa), AND the anchor text in the links.

ScottM

11:41 am on Nov 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Relevance (of one site's content to another) can't hurt but might not help

I'm not so sure about that. I actually think it helps.

A recent dip into 'algo' research brought me to the conclusion that the 'similar pages' part has some bearing on ranking. That being said, on topic links, seems to help. Regardless of who owns them.

Grumpus

12:02 pm on Nov 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I link all of the sites I design to my web design site. I also link from my web design site to just about every site I design. It's never had a problem, gives the new site a nice seed for the crawl, and the PR of my design site keeps creeping up each month - and I don't have to worry about link exchange requests for it, I just have to do a couple of jobs.

There hasn't been a problem, but it does often take Google several months longer to get a good bearing on "what's similar" to the new site - which, could, I suppose, be a problem in the short run, but it's not really noticable from my experience.

G.