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Ok this might be a big post, but u should read on ... i'll start from scratch
4 of my websites were of the same theme, they were company websites and all manufactured same products. 5 Others were different. One of the sites (out of the 4) was my dad's. So, I went ahead and gave blind links from other 3 same theme websites to my dad's site. Originally my PR was 4. It came down to 3 after that .. and the internal pages .. all of them to 0 from 2. So, I removed those links immediately. After 4 to 5 weeks Some of the internal pages got PR1 and PR2 .. just 10% of them. After that I tried finding about google punishments somewhere .. which mentioned you should have reciprocal links from websites. Right, so I promptly did that. But this time at the bottom of the pages :
links : link1.com ¦ link2.com till 5!
Did the same on all the other 5 websites (couldn't have done it on he same 3 websites cause they were competitors). And these all of the websites had different themes. I didn't link with the same manufacturing product companies. One was related to an industrial product, one to tailoring, etc.. Except the site which i was talking bout got penalized had ISO recognition and so had words like ISO RWTUV etc.. and one of the linked websites was about ISO certification and all. Eventually I again got penalized and my pages which had recovered to Pr1 and PR2 dropped to 0 again. All other linked websites suffered as well some got grey bar some got pr0 to internal pages, but none of the main index pages got penalized. Again, that ISO website didn't get a grey bar (it was already pr0 from the start) .. so none of the pages got affected on that website which I believe because 2 of the sites had ISO words and decriptions so it seemed genuine.
I just analyzed all this today. I just hope I get start getting PRs back even if takes 2 months again. I have learnt my lesson and wish that google doesn't keep the penalty forever this time. And that's the way it should be. Because I had no knowledge bout it i went ahead with cross linking ... got penalized.
If googleguy reads this, can you verify if my observation was right or wrong? And do penalties last forever or they ease out after sometime depening on if the sites got PR0 / grey bar?
I really dont think transparant cross linking for the good of users - relevant pages from another site whether they are owned by you or on the same server - without going overboard, is going to cause a problem. That means you probably dont need them on every page, and that it dsent necessarilly mean that it needs a link back as well. Just choose what pages really DO need reference to another page to make their point.
I find that sensible linking:
(a) rewards the parties concerned with traffic, not just Google ranking (which we regard as a bonus but not the aim)
(b) is not penalized
(c) is really quite useful when not taken to excess
(d) is not a good idea if you round robin...always better to have a sink site IMO
Ah a nightmare!
I also observe now that if i search for the domain name and no .com atached with it .. it shows those other 4 websites of mine which has links coming from it.. which shows that might be the cause.
another thing to support it is .. the non-related sites . all their internal pages have gone grey bared .. they don't show on google anymore .. expect for that ISO website ..
It's defenitely crosslinking with non-related websites that has got me this punishment.
What about, for example, sites that deal in collectibles? They may not want to link to direct competitors, so they link to other "non-related" collectible sites.
I have seen this many times with no apparent penalty.
Thoughts?
Also, doesn't PR get diluted as it is spread across domains?
I don't know what an ISO recognition is so I couldn't say if it effects your PR.
I think gray bar just means the pages are not in their database. This could be because the site was down when googlebot came by. May not be penalty.
My site was penalized in August 2001 and is (I think this update) a PR1 on index and PR0 the rest. Index used to be a PR4.
[edited by: MotherE at 9:28 am (utc) on May 22, 2003]
All of the sites are hosted under one reseller account, the sites which were crossed linked got grey bared (internal pages).. no other .. I doubt they were down when google came .. and google does check back 5 to 6 times atleast if it cannot get thru.
ISO recognition is a technical thing .. companies can get that certficate which my dad has and other site which was linked to my dad's site was about ISO certficiation .. so they had some relation i mean which is why it got spared.
The more i disucuss this the more I realise it's because of crosslinking non-related sites.
