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I think that as webmasters get more and more skilled at easier and easier ways of creating and maintaining sites, there is a natural inclination to branch out and create more and more sites. Say one person controls 20 domains some of which are similar in terms of content and some of which are not. In order to maximize PR and to get newer domains spidered, there is also a natural tendency to interlink sites.
This can be a real dangerous area as some webmasters seem to be learning. So if you take page 1 of each of your 20 domains and at the bottom of each page 1, you link to each of the other 19 domains, you are setting youyrself up for a visit from a human being who may not like your system of interlinking. This is especially dangerous when you link your pretty pink widget site to your pretty pink wedding gown site and back again. But I believe there is a similar danger when you interlink your pretty pink widget and ugly pink widget sites.
IMHO, there is a way to interlink all your sites and get the spiders to all of them. Of course you may not get as much PR to each of your sites as you want but you may avoid getting PR0 to all of your sites. By setting up an "affiliates" or "friends" page, you avoid linking from Site1/Page1 to Site2/Page1 and from Site2/Page1 to Site1/Page1 which when applied to some number of sites seems to have the potential of getting you into big trouble with Google.
Has anyone else had troubles of getting penalized by interlinking their sites? Anyone have solutions to such a problem? Can this lead to a total ban by Google? What is the time frame from getting PR0 to getting a real ban?
Yes, I've seen a friend get in trouble this way, although something really troubles me.
If you search for some specific products and take the time to do a whois on the top 10 people out there you'll find that VERY often the top 5 or 6 places belong to a same organization.
These are often very heavily interlinked. But they've been out there for years, I first saw a certain site about 1 year ago, last holidays.
Just out of curiosity, to see how time had done them, I went back today and searched. Not only are they still #1 out of 1 million, but the first 3 or 4 results are their own sites interlinked.
So I actually wonder if this is OK. I've read Brett Tabke say that doing many domains for regional or specific produts from a same marketer is legitimate and accepted.
And if you think about it why shouldn't you refer your visitors to other of your product domains? With domains this cheap why should you have to build pages when you can dedicated a whole domain to a good product?
I really think Google will need to adapt to the Web, not the other way around. All of the sudden I'm scared of buying domains and linking them because I might be penalized......geezus....
You're absolutely right on this, especially for large companies with many related products, brands, regions, etc. They interlink most of their sites and most of them sit on the same servers. Their expected to inter-promote their products.
"I really think Google will need to adapt to the Web" should be more like "Google has to adapt to the real business world."
But we should all be very careful when interlinking our own sites, especially those of closely related or very similar content. That's where can run into trouble and one of your competitors reports you.
Jim
Happens all the time. My domains, for instance, are part of a public-private cooperative that publishes guide sites for a growing list of communities (many are finding out that there is more to SEO than they envisioned). Though the whois is in my company's name, and these sites are built on a templated, themed style, these are the official sites for dozens of towns, historic sites, and even state agencies. There's no doubt that competitive complaints have been filed --I've had to fill in the blanks for an editor or two, on occassion. But so far, whois is just an editor's review tool, not something that's plugged into an algo.
BTW, if you think the whois info is correct in the ultra-competitive categories, I have a bridge I want to sell you.
I have a theory that interlinking your own sites is most likely to cause trouble if that's the only links some of your sites have, and gaining quality inbound links from external sites builds a margin of safety.
Launch your new site, and give it one link from one of your established sites. Don't worry about linking back at this point, as you want to give it the PR to let googlebot dig as deep as possible as soon as possible.
Then link to it from one of your other sites, for every 10 external links you receive. Link back to one of your other sites for every 10 outbound links you make to sites that you do not own.
Don't launch more than one site a month off of each parent site. Keep building other incoming and outgoing links from the parent sites too.
It isn't the interlinking that is bad, it is interlinking in such a way that it sets off some sort of trigger that makes it appear that your main goal is to boost your PR then you will get dinged. If you can do your crosslinking in a way that would keep a human reviewer happy even after they check whois, then so much the better. Remember, different human reviewers will have different requirements for what they consider excessive.
