Linking between Sites - Maximise google position

[Bish]

I have a web site with a pretty strong brand name, and obviously we are number one for that brand name when people do a google search, but we have a couple of hate sites that are listed in the 3-6 positions on our searches. Obviously, as people do a lot of searches on our brand name, this is not a good situation for us to be in, as people read these and directly quote this to us when doing business. Unfortunately these are not illegal but in our opinion are not fair reflections of our business.

So, to solve this problem we are creating a number of resource sites, forums, blogs etc under different domain names hosted on different servers. The aim is to out rank the hate sites with the new sites. Obviously these will attract they're own backlinks, which will help with their search engine position.

So I have a couple of questions.

In order to boost our myspace page, we linked to it from the home page of the website, and now it is sitting pretty at number 9 in the rankings.

Is this an effective SEO strategy to then link our home page to our blog, forum, .tv site with tv footage etc?

Is there any potential risk to our home site by doing this?

Can we link back from all of these sites to our home page? Will google read this as a 'triangular-link/recipricol link' and toss out the site, or minimise the page rank passed? If this is a problem can we link backusing either a scripted link ir a link with a html 'no follow' tag. Will scripting the return link, or adding a no follow tag cause google to send the page rank one way, or will it cause google to note that its still a 2 way link, even though its been asked to confer ‘link weight’ only one of the ways.

There are business reasons to point the forum, blog and .tv site back to the home page, but at the same time our priority is to remove these bad listings and this is more important to our organization than sending the additional traffic to our home page.

Thoughts?

Bish

[Swanson]

To me the problem is the hate sites. This sounds bad and why do you have hate sites that rank so highly unless there is something there - are you called Iomart?!?

Yes, creating sites just to displace hate sites is a serious problem area and the way you are doing it will indeed cause flags to be raised. To try to outrank sites in this way will not be easy and a lot less hassle than dealing with the hate sites themselves.

[Bish]

Sure, we have tried to deal with the hate sites amicably but this hasn't been successful. Jealousy is a powerful motivation for some people I guess.

The sites are seperate sites we were going to build anyway. All of them are high quality sites with fresh orginal content. My question is

1) Can google spider flash/javascript/html 'no follow' tagged links, and record them as recipricated links. Is it a risk they would see these links pointing back at our main site as reciprical, and not pass page rank (or worse, think we are manipulating the index, and not link back)?

Thanks

Bish

[MThiessen]

I can certainly understand wanting to beat out the hate sites. It is a shame they even exist.

That being said, lets look at your solution through google's eyes.

If you attempt to dominate ALL of page one, no matter how "pure" your intentions are, you might look in their eyes like you are trying to edge out competitors.

Remember the old days on the web when it was "common" for one company to dominate the top 10 serps, sometimes the entire first two pages? I think google would start gunning for you, maybe the algo itself would find you. Google can tell what sites you own, and I don't think it will look kindly on you owning every site on the first page of the results.

It might end up getting all sites dropped if G thinks you are trying to create a monopoly.