Interlinked Domains

GoogleGuy's reponse

[Good_Vibes]

Lurking around in old discussions, I found this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Notice GoogleGuy's post at message #4.

Since then, it seems to me that there is definitely something to worry about if you have hundreds of "templated" pages that all crosslink. From by readings in this forum, people appear quite sure that crosslinking like crazy will definitely get you penalized in Google (by the algorithm, not by a human).

Is GoogleGuy's comment outdated?
Has he since corrected himself?

[BigDave]

His reply was to a specific case. 14,000 inbound links on the site, and the other domains were subdomains. And he was not doing this for any sort of spamming, so it would pass a hand check.

[Good_Vibes]

Yes, I might pass a hand check, but I question if it would pass a robots check today?

My guess is that it would not, and thus GoogleGuy's comments would not apply today due to automated penalties.

In short, I suspect that if read today, the comment would actually be wrong.

(I'm hoping someone can prove me wrong ;))

[BigDave]

No, it think it would prove to be right. In that specific case, which was all that he was commenting on.

The interlinking was not due to any template on the page, it was due to different people signing each other's guestbooks. And the site has a large number of inbound links from independant sources.

Even back in August, that comment would not apply to your site unless you are talking about the exact same site and nothing major has changed. It was not a policy comment, it was a "*your* site has nothing to worry about" comment. It was not a blanket endorsement of having your site and standard navigation crossing domain boundaries.

[Good_Vibes]

Ahhh... So you are saying that you think GoogleGuy's comments refer to this:

by leaving guest book entries on other users' pages all of them are heavily interlinked

Not to this:

all have the same layout template

I assumed the reverse, and it seems strange that GoogleGuy would support 90 000+ pages built with the same template.

[buckworks]

Why not? A consistent template would make a site more user-friendly.

[Good_Vibes]

I agree on 1 site. But if he changes it to hundreds (or thousands) of sites by using nickname.domain.com, it become a template used across many domains.

Seems to me this would be spam, no?

[vitaplease]

I think what was suggested there, is that interlinking between subdomains will be regarded as interlinking within the same domain.

No penalty - no benefit.

[Good_Vibes]

Interesting Vita.

So you think www.domain.com and nick.domain.com are perceived by Google as the same domain?

[vitaplease]

Linking wise yes.

What do you read out of his comment in the aforementioned thread?

All heavy artificial crosslinking between seperate sites has always been frowned upon by Google.

Subdomains make an easy identification.

[nativenewyorker]

It is likely that Google's recent suggestion to have up to 100 links per page is targeted to reduce the importance of pages and sites with heavy crosslinking.

Ted

[DaveN]

good_vibes, I know what you mean, but that thread was about a massive community website,

Take is for example : ign

[google.com...]

google is not going to ban or any automated penalties.

DaveN

If example not acceptable to the mods please find another which is ;)

[jomaxx]

Geez, the totality of Googleguy's comments were "I wouldn't worry about this".

[Mark Candiotti]

nativenewyorker

When and where did Google suggest 100 links per page?

[atadams]

Mark,

Google has posted their "Webmaster Guidelines" at: [google.com...]

Although I find them vague in certain areas, they do state "keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)".