Effect of Interlinking unrelated sites in a subdirectory architecture

[doughayman]

Hi all,

I have a domain that I've owned for about 12 years, for which I have about 10 websites, each of which is contained within a subdirectory of the domain. For example,

www.example.com/subdir1/index.htm
www.example.com/subdir2/index.htm
.
.
.
www.example.com/subdirN/index.htm

For the most part each of these 10 websites (contained in a subdirectory of the master domain) are unrelated content-wise. Some contain info on widgets, some on gizmos, some on news, etc.

In any event, most of these 10 websites, have anywhere from 10-20 web pages contained within them, with 2 or 3 of these pages linking to the main page of each of the aforementioned 10 main index pages.

Hence, I do a fairly extensive amount of interlinking between these sub-directory based sites (within my single domain), and again, they are not related content-wise.

QUESTION: Will these cross-internal-links AUGMENT, PENALIZE, or have NO EFFECT on the search engine ranking of the main index pages, for relevant anchor text terms, if:

1) The link comes from a cross-linked page with a PR > 0,
but whose content is unrelated ?

2) The link comes from a cross-linked page that has Grey Bar PR, and
whose content is unrelated ?

Comments/thoughts would be appreciated. Also, same 2 questions above, if the same cross-linking practices are employed from a subject-unrelated separate domain ?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:56 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2009]
[edit reason] changed to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

In the case of subdirectories, I think some effect will be there (discovery at least) but it will be minimal. Pretty much the same thing when interlinking across two domains, except that if it's carried to excess the domains may look like paart of a link farm and get penalized.

If the themes are unrelated, then the cross-links can only be for ranking purposes and not for your visitors. You'll need to develop a healthy backlink profile in either case, if you want to be competitive. The stronger your "editorial" backlinks are, the less you need to worry about it.

[doughayman]

Related to the above, what about within one subidirectory:

www.example.com/subdirN/

If each and every page within this subdirectory-based website has a footer link, each with the SAME anchor text (which is related to the subject matter - e.g., "Return to the Blue Widget Main Page"), that points to the main subdirectory page at:

www.example.com/subdirN/index.htm

And assume that I do this for each and every subdirectory-based website (there are maybe 10 of them), will this potentially initiate a Google penalty for either:

- Over interlinking ?

- Lack of Variation of Anchor Text ?

Thanks in advance.