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By now, I have learnt a bit about SEO and google ethics (as compared to a couple of months ago when I didn't even know PR). But unfortunately, my six big sites have been having heavy cross-linking from every page of each site since last 5 years or so and I never knew that it could lead to trouble. And since I knew nothing of SEO, so the linking was not intentional; I just wanted to refer to other sites of mine that's all. Had I known about PR manipulation and/or anchor text, I would have used the keywords in the anchor text which is not the case (now I am thinking of changing the link text though).
The problem is that one of the six sites of mine seems to have been punished since it won't come up anywhere even when searched with keywords in the link text, that is- domain name. Searching for www.domainname.com returs- No information found. Has my site been penalized? Noticeable thing is that the site has a PR 6.
Shall I assume that the site has beeen punished for heavy cross-liking? I had read at some forum that in case of such linking, google will drop one of the sites and it could be any. That seems to be the case. Any thoughts?
The other question, and the more important one, is that if I manage a heap of links for the site in question so that the ratio of incoming and outgoing links is balanced, will it be alright then? Or do I need to overhaul the liking strategy?
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
It's not too pleasant or practical to assume anything like that unless there's something concrete to go by, but generally "a word to the wise is sufficient" so start scaling back and broadening the variety links for each of the sites.
I've seen a group of sites (actually more than one - several) that are heavily cross-linked and they're still out there, but it really can't hurt to play it safe and cut way back on that cross-linking.
It's not even practical to have the same number of inbound and outbound links, but each site should have some one way links both in and out, not all should be reciprocal, and each of the sites should have a good proportion of independent links of their own.
That would represent a natural, random linking pattern, while heavy cross-linking really does look contrived even if the intentions are just to move traffic back and forth.
Really stupid of me that I didn't check the log files. Though there hasn't been a down time, but google hasn't visited since September and obviosuly that's the problem. Why hasn't it visited is another question but I'll figure that out, may be some server problem.
And also, I am going to change the linking structure. May be I am not punihsed as yet, but who knows if my fears come true somewhere down the line? Better safe than sorry.
