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Company_A.com sells apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas.
Soon, there will be websites for Company_B.com, Company_C.com, and Company_D.com, which will also sell fruit.
Company_A.com sells apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas.
Company_B.com will only sell oranges.
Company_C.com will only sell grapes.
Company_D.com will sell everything company_A.com sells.
Here are my concerns:
1. Since the ultimate goal is to improve the PR of Company_A.com, does Company_A.com need to link to the 3 affiliate sites?
2. Would it be better if the 3 affiliate sites linked to each other, or just Company_A.com?
3. Since Company_B.com only sells oranges, should they only link to Company_A.com's homepage, or also their secondary page on oranges?
4. This is my most crucial question. Would the 3 affiliate sites be more effective if they all sold apples, oranges, grapes and banannas? Or, since Company_B.com and Company_C.com only sell one kind of fruit (oranges & grapes), will that be more helpful for Company_A.com's PR for these keyword searches?
The modern approach is hub and spoke
A to B, A to C, A to D
B to A, C to A, D to A
BUT NOT B to C, C to D, or B to D
I don't understand this part. Don't I need to link the three sites together to help boost their initial PR value?
Or, are you suggesting the Googlebot might recognize that all these sites are pointing to Company_A.com and penalize it?
It's easier to go get exchange links from relevant sites (and even exchange links will boost your PR) than to play all those crosslinking games. What's more, the exhange links can bring you some long-term targeted traffic even if Googleplex falls into the sea when the "Big One" hits.
By definition, what you are doing is strictly against Google's TOS.
Creating a closed loop of sites, without any inbound links from reputable 3rd parties, purely for inflating PR is a finely crafted recipe for Penalization a la Googlé.
I would highly suggest some serious study beginning with...
Thou Shalt Not v.2002 [webmasterworld.com]
Define Over Optimization [webmasterworld.com]
Crosslinking, Interlinking and Reciprocal Linking [webmasterworld.com]
Content and Linking Guidelines for Google
[webmasterworld.com]
I just found WW after reading another forum for quite some time and there's no comparison. The info here is awesome. OK, enough sucking up, on to my question.
I have been tasked (challegned) with getting PR and rankings to a large group of websites, all of which are on their own IP's within a discreet class c. In order to so this, I have access to an existing group of sites, already indexed and with various PR, on another class c that I can use to link out from. I'm limited in that I have to use SSI files to create the links from the old sites to the new. Each SSI "link list" will appear on about ten or so sites (ie. no more than 10 identical lists of links on any given site).
I am well versed on SEO, and I have read everything I can find on crosslinking in this forum. I told the "honchos" that the best way to get the sites ranked is old fashioned link exchanges, directory listings, and relevant content, and that we risk getting penalized by doing it this way. The content we have, the link exchanges and directory listings will come later, but right now they want immediate results.
Any opinions on the best way to do this? Hubs? Recips between groups of sites? Non-recips between different groups? Forget it and go tie one on? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Dean
As far as getting "immediate results"...
I would avoid duplicating identical link pages from site to site... to close a cousin of Link Farms for my taste. (and possibly Google's)
Work on strengthening the internal link stratgegy for each of the sites, making sure that you are making optimal use of relevant and descriptive anchor text in all links.
Make sure that each site has a well structured site map.
Make sure the titles of each page are spot on with relevant keywords.
Think of the user first... only cross linking in the contexts that will be helpful to your visitors will help both them and the search engines.
The following should yield some more ideas and insights with regards to linking strategies...
Linking - The Big Picture [webmasterworld.com]
Researching the Ideal SEO Hub [webmasterworld.com]
A Question of Hubs [webmasterworld.com]
Search Engine Theme Pyramids and Google [webmasterworld.com]
Is Interlinking a Reason to be Banned? [webmasterworld.com]
I've seen a lot of posts where the webmaster has the job of optimizing a site for a SE, but the powers-that-be say "you can't do this.....or that.....no, sorry, that's out of the question."
I know how those guys feel now.
I'm extremely cautious about anything that looks like a link farm. I'm just wondering if there is a threshhold # of sites that google looks for identical links on before classifying a site as link farming. I could probably find a way to randomize the links each time a page is loaded, but that would mean that every time googlebot passed through, it would see a different set of outgoing links. That sounds like a sure fire way to make the little guy angry.
All of the sites offer content relevant to the keyphrases they are targeting. It's kind of sad in that if a human google editor were to look, they would probably agree. But of course, that doesn't happen.
btw, thanks for the cool topical links too. I hadn't found some of those. There's so much info here.
