Interlinking network of 300 sites good or bad?

300 sites link to each other, positive or negative SEO outcome.

[visca]

We have a client who has a network of 300 web sites. Currently, they are all interlinking to each other to help boost their ranking. We have heard much conflicting rumors as to whether this is a good method or not.

My question is... Is this a good approach or bad approach in attempting to improve the sites ranking? If it is bad, what is a better strategy? We have all these sites, so we wish to leverage them to boost each other up.

Any recommendations would be most greatly appreciated.

[caveman]

IMO, limited, natural linking, i.e., that makes sense, such as between only the related ones, is still OK generally. Oddly enough G seems best able to handle this; the filters at the other SE's less so.

Unless you want to put the whole lot at risk, I would not go beyond that. Look at it from the SE's POV and think about what you'd do if you were them, and came across your network during a manual inspection. They're gonna take a good long look, at the very least. ;-)

[BarHopper]

I would have to strongly agree with Caveman.

If your going to link a network of 300 sites together its going to appear that you are trying to steal popularity from each one and gain important in a monopoly type of style. This will not go over good in especially google. If any of them are riding on the same IP location you will get nailed for that as well. My opinion is that you spread your network across hundreds of other peoples sites. You will get the best results taking your network of 300 sites and creating relationships to other sites and have those sites link to you. Then google will see your sites are popular across the board and give you some credit for your "true" existance in the web. Stay away from network linking your own sites together. IMO.

-Bar

[graeme_p]

I have a similar problem on a much smaller scale - it only involves two sites.

Site A has lots of deep links to site B - because site B contains explanations of terminology used on site A.

There are currently no links to site A from B

Site B has more traffic at the moment, but site A has more potential.

Is it wise to add a link to site A from the navigation bar of site B?

[visca]

Thanks BarHopper. All 300 sites in fact do have their own IP addresses and are scattered across a combination of shared hosting accounts and dedicated servers. This is to help break up the IP blocks the sites would be part of. If the sites have seperate IP's do you still believe the current configuration of them all being interlinked still a problem? Or do you highly recommend for them to be broken down by related category and linked only to relevant sites?