My competitors are all linking together from index page

[needsomehelp]

I just noticed that about 5-6 of my competitors are all linking together via their homepages. All of the sites are basically affiliate directories offering the same range of services. Is this spam since the only type of benefit I see as a result of this link exchange is page rank for their respected sites.

The sites participating in this link exchange all have sky rocketed their page ranks to 7 and 8's. I am pretty sure this increase in page rank is as a result of the interlinking. Excluding their own linking system, I have exchanged links with pretty much all of the same sites as these sites.

[fathom]

If they are offering something -- and the received offering is as promised I wouldn't believe that it's spam.

Unless I'm missing something?

[heini]

Looks like crosslinking is the Google topic du jour. I guess it depends on some variables if Google views this as intolerable crosslinking or as quite okay crosslinking.
Needsomehelp, fyi there are quite a few discussions running on that topic, lots of opinions offered there.

[edited by: heini at 10:35 pm (utc) on Mar. 17, 2003]

[needsomehelp]

Thanks...
I guess we will wait and see.
My competitors are so agressive. I'm in it for long-term success and would rather play strict "to the books" and not have to worry about being penalized.

[fathom]

hmmm... a single page isn't crosslinking.

More like reciprocal linking.

You can't get penalized by adding only one link - no matter how many "one links" there is.

Duplicate content however, might be a factor.

[needsomehelp]

Let me get this right. If I have 5 sites and link all of the homepages together, that's not bad?

[fathom]

Sure like:

Copyright 2003 Widgery Ltd. All rights reserved.

Widgery owns and operates widgets.com, wigdet-history.com, and virtual-widgets.com.

and each is a link to the mainpage of each site.

A single link isn't the problem, 100's to 1000's of link are.

Hard to manipulate anything with just 1 link.

[needsomehelp]

I have 2 sites that target the same terms and offer the same service in a very competetive field. These sites piggy back in rankings even though the content is different for both sites. I had one site linked to the other from all pages but took the links down in fear of one of my competitors complaining that I had 2 sites listed for same terms. Now you would not be able to tell both sites were from me unless you looked up whois.

Am I wrong with this cautious tactic?

[Chile]

re: link exchanges

Two sites that lead to the same point of sale might be a bad idea. But, two sites that are seperate from one another, using different content, and providing different accounts for sales ought to be fine and dandy.

[fathom]

Crosslinking penalties and bans occur because of artificial manipuation of votes.

If you are the only one linking to yourself (voting) this is abusing the reasoning of link popularity & PageRank.

Almost every major site & portal has crosslinking in their sites...

Macromedia > Shockwave, Apple > Quitetime, Microsoft > MSN, Adobe > Acrobat, IBM > WebSphere to name a few...

But they don't get hit with penalties or bans simply because crosslinks is but a very small percentage of their overall inbound links to each site.

A good margin to start with is at minimum 2:1 - for every 2 crosslinks you should have at minimum another unique link. (plus different outbounds)

200 > 100

As your site grows however, the ratio should decrease to par (by the time you get to 1,000) and then 1:2 in favor of uniques by 10,000, and so on.

[Jesse_Smith]

:::I just noticed that about 5-6 of my competitors are all linking together via their homepages.

If you can't beat em, join em.

Try to get them all to link to you and you link to all of them, unless the same person ownes all of those sites and he's just linking to all of his own sites.