Interlinking sites

[kira]

If a group of about ten to twenty webmasters were to interlink their sites (different hosts/domains) by means of placing the exact same table of links at the bottom of various pages of their sites, could this potentially lead to a penalty?

Would there be any way to accomplish this interlinking that would be less risky, perhaps by changing the anchor text for each outgoing link?

Thank you in advance for your advice!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I would say that this woould be very risky. If I were a search engine I would probably decide that this was a link farm and react accordingly.

As Google says, "Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good."

[JuniorOptimizer]

This might inflict you with a condition I refer to as "Slow Death". Be careful.

[ClearlyBusiness]

how about a group of websites, in different languages, for the same company, same domain names, just country specific, aka: widget.com, widget.co.uk, widget.de, widget.fr

7 of them, it would be NATURAL to interlink these websites, as you never know, if someone from one country finds the site from another country and then can just jump there, as well the content is unique on each website, as of course the language is different, sometimes even the content itself.

Do I have to go with the unnatural way to prevent a penalty, any experiences in this matter?

thanks

[aris1970]

Hi ClearlyBusiness,

I had a similar problem with 2 language versions of the same site based on different domains.

I decided to post a link on every page of each site that leads to a pop-up window on the same site (so it's an internal link) that THEN links to the other language version/domain.

By this way, you have just one link from each website point to the other one and you can be sure that you will not suffer any penalty at all. This will also help each site as the PR of the pop-up window will be high enough to help and pass it to the other domain/version.

Just my 2 cents...

[larryhatch]

How about 5 or 6 small retail businesses in some small town. Lets say 2 restaurants (Chinese and Mexican),
a gas station, a motel and whateve else.
Suppose they all interlink just to get seen. (Almost nobody else would link in.)

If they are careful to keep the rest of their sites different, might they risk penalties as a so-called
linking scheme? They have the same small town as a common theme.

I don't think they're doing anything bad. Might some algorithm see otherwise? -Larry

[fischermx]

I think there are threshold to overpass in the google algos in order to this be detected.

At the begining of the year I signed on a link scheme like this, one that asked you to put a piece of code in your page and from that populate a directory.
It worked for about 2 months, I mean, that particular site showed the incoming links in google.
But on the 3rd month, all the incoming link disappeared in google, like if they were not counted at all, the site was not penalized either, btw.
Yahoo also indexed those incoming links but they took like 6 months to find out and remove them.
MSN still showing the links from that shared links.

[shortbus1662]

I have links to all of the sites in my network at the bottom in my footer. I haven't seen any problems with this so far. I got banned from google, but not for that reason, and all of the other sites have remained listed without problems...

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I don't think they're doing anything bad. Might some algorithm see otherwise? -Larry

You don't have to do anything bad to get filtered out by Google now, as many of use here can testify :(

[diamondgrl]

I am faced with this because of a family of similar sites used by professionals. It is natural to interlink them because most users will want to know of our other services that they might use.

But I've resolved that the only safe way to do it is to use "nofollow" links in the table. That way, Google should not see this as an attempt to boost PR.

[Johan007]

Logically it should be fine to interlink sites (like all major sites do like Honda, BBC, Yahoo and even Google!) as long as they don’t link to a banned site so I recommend a links page that you control. Also only link to related content for future Google ranking.