Massive Crosslinking of Two sites

does it effect your results in Google ( benefit or harm )

[Sobriquet]

I am trying an experiment and would like to you know your views.

I have one site ( 5 years old ) good positions in google. lets call this site A

I have another site, 6 months old and nothing in google as yet, but good results from msn. lets call it B

site A and B belong to two diffrent categaories of same niche area.

The left menu of B is a long list of topics in my niche area , which , I included in the left menu of Site A. This means that as the left menu of Site A finishes, the topics list with links leading to site B starts. At present, there are about 20 topics ( and therefore 20 links ) of site B, apperng below left menu of site A. The links to site B topics open in a new window.

I am doing this to attract traffic to site B. The whole process is datadriven and both the sites are resting on diffrent servers, diffrent IPs but in same datacenter.

My questions are

1) Will linking massively to site B anyhow effect my search positions of Site A?

2) Are there chances of site B getting indexed faster? (it has not doen so in last 6 months, inspite of beign crawled.)

3) is this anyway a bad practice or an SEO problem area?

4 ) Any other comments.

[annej]

The word massive is what has me concerned. If you link more selectively you may have a better chance of getting people interested in visiting. People don't look too long a list of links and Google might note it as spammy.

Also if the two sites are in the same neighborhood, hosted by the service for example the links may not count for anything in terms of Google but they many not hurt you either.

I've selectively linked between my two related sites for a few years and it's never hurt me. It used to help but now I think it's just neutral in terms of Google. But I do want the visitors of one site to visit the other.

[Sobriquet]

i would try to explain. my both sites structure is based on topic > article format . the topics appear on left side of both and look of both sites is utterly simple ( boring ). now just think that the left menu of site B starts appearing after the left menu of finishes ( dynamically ).

I wonder if the number of links to any given site would have any influence on google search algo or the way google looks at it.

one more questions : do the words ( phrases ) that appear into the menu be considered as keywords by google for site A. maybe.. just wondering.

[RichTC]

In a nutshell your site B is still in the sandbox and your site A is doing well due to age and other factors. Im guessing that B has low PR if any?

One link from A to B is a vote for it. If you give loads of different anchor text links to B from A (which is your index on the side of your page you refer to)you are draining your own PR away to B - result is you could end up with two sites positioned low in the serps.

Give ONE link to B from A by all means but when you start talking of "a massive number of links" i think you could be asking for trouble - google could treat it as spam and sandbox site A, i wouldnt risk it.

Work on securing new links for B whilst you await its release from the sanbox. If you have waited 6 mths already you dont have long to go, 3-6 mths more to go - why risk it?

Good Luck

[Sobriquet]

Thanks Rich TC.

u are right. site B is sandboxed. it has some good incoming links since a lot of time, but yet.. nothin from G at all. google spiders the site often but never indexes it.

regarding site A, how many links max should be ok, say 5 or so?

--- adding---

i just changed it to 5 randomly (order by rand()) selected topic links to site B. what is your view oto this?

[minnapple]

2 1/2 years ago a client split their site into 8 subcat sites, all cross linked. That did well for a while but then it turned south.

18 months ago all site content and products, were merged backed into the main site, the other sites were 301'ed and profitability increased significantly.

[sit2510]

Sobriquet,

I think you already has a hunch that it might not be worth the risk to do massive linking from Site A to Site B, since your site A (5 year old) is doing well in Google. IMO it would not worth the risk, especially this time when it is super difficult to rank well in Google. Some links from only 1 page should be sufficient, so if you are interested to pass your visitors to Site B and not too concerned about passing PR, then you may want to consider the rel="nofollow" tag applying it to links on all other pages.

[Small Website Guy]

The dangers of cross-linking have been talked about a lot on Webmaster World, but there has never been any concrete advice on how much is too much or how to avoid getting penalized.

My theory on cross-linking is that, as a general rule, this helps both sites and boosts Page Rank. This was discovered many years ago, and webmasters eager to increase their search engine traffic shamelessly cross-linked their sites and got good results.

But Google engineers, ever vigilant to prevent people from gaming the system, saw that they were being gamed and programmed the algorithm to attempt to find unnatural cross-linking and punish sites that do this. But natural cross-linking is still allowed. For example, blogs crosslink a lot yet they do very well in seach engines.

So I believe that a little cross-linking still helps, but if you go over the line (and I have no idea where the line is) then you will be hurt a lot.