Dangerous link swap?

What would be included in a bad neighbourhood?

[SlyOldDog]

I received an offer of a link swap from a company that has a few domains. e.g.

London Widgets
Las vegas widgets
New York widgets

You can probably guess what the widgets are...

Anyway, he links all his domains together which according to the locals at Webmasterworld is a no no. One of them already has a penalty. Whilst there's nothing wrong in this because they cover different locations, Google will probably catch up with him at some point.

My question is this. When Google bans a neighbourhood, will they ban any site linking to the neighbourhood? Or is it more likely you would only get banned if you link to more than one of the sites. I mean, anybody can link to one of the sites. It's an honest mistake.

Or is it more likely that I could get into trouble for a reciprocal link?

Better to leave it alone? Probably. Anyone have a different opinion? Even better, anyone with experience?

[Yidaki]

>Better to leave it alone?

Yep, definitely!

[bcc1234]

Put him on a page with noindex,nofollow.
If he asks why - explain him.

[TWhalen]

>>Anyway, he links all his domains together which according to the locals at Webmasterworld is a no no.<<

I've always linked all my topic-related websites together, and I've never received a penalty for doing it.

Matter of fact, I'd say it actually helps.

Where did you get the idea that its a "no-no"?

[tigger]

I think it really depends how many sites you’re linking up I would say 1-5 should be fine. Also if by linking them you are helping the user then even the better.

I’ve linked 3 sites up on a similar theme that are all ranking ok and all have PR6 index pages with PR5 for the rest of the site, these are linked on the index page and some other links on related pages, so far no problems

[hiker_jjw]

If you're linking your sites together, it's a good idea to make sure the IP addresses are different.

[Yidaki]

Crosslinking your own sites/domains may be good ... may be bad ... could damage ... could help ...

But what SlyOldDog said is that the guy who's interested in exchanging links allready has a penalty on one of his sites! So, i'd say keep your fingers away of swaping any link with him! Travel buz ...? ... i'd suspect he's crosslinking in a no-no-way!

[new_shoes]

> One of them already has a penalty.

Just curious, how do you know this for sure - does it have a PR of 0?

[SlyOldDog]

Yep. The white bar of death

[drewlewis]

A question if I may. I have a few sites where the home page ranks 1/10 on the google meter. Some of the deeper pages rank 0/10. I recently cross-linked some of these pages to several relevant sites. Will this penalize the pages to which I linked?

Secondly I can't imagine that the pages with 0/10 could have drawn penalty as they haven't been up for very long nor have I used any spaming tactics on them.

[shady]

There is no benefit in links from low PR pages. Therefore, you should avoid it anyway, irrespective of whether it will be detremental.

[drewlewis]

Yes I see that it would not help the main page in ranking but will it hurt.

For example if the main site in about rainforest destruction in general and smaller sites are about specific localized rainforest habitats, would linking from a new site about Belize rainforests (PR=0) hurt the main site with a (PR=5)

Even if there were no gain in ranking I would still want to link these sites for the exchange of information. However, if it hurts the visibility or ranking of the main site on the search engines by linking in this way we would have to come up with another plan.

[rogerd]

One or two PR0 links shouldn't hurt, particularly if your site is reasonably well linked and you have other links on your site. I'm sure I've got some on my sites that I haven't caught. I'm not a believer in the "link only for PR benefit" strategy - I think you should link to sites that make sense for your visitors. Nevertheless, I'd be kind of reluctant to knowingly link to a PR0 site, since you probably don't know why it is in that condition. If for some reason Google thinks your linkee is a spammer (rightly or wrongly), it could create some risk to your site's PR. I'd hold off a bit, or put the link on a page that won't get spidered or indexed by Google as someone suggested earlier.

[trueMarketing]

I have a similar situation. I've linked approximately 8 websites together in such a way that there has been no damage to my PR. In fact, I've seen only an increase in the overall PR of all of the websites.

Tips to remember though:
1. I have a news related site in Dmoz > points to a news related page within another site I have.
2. I have a pharmacy website > pointing to another "health" related website with specific information about the pharmaceutical drug I'm promoting.
3. All 8 websites are on different IPs with different hosts.
4. Another good PR boost from this whole group is that I've spent some time submitting them to appropriate directories that make sense for each site, etc, etc.

So, if you can point to appropriate themes and do not just "cross-link" them all (ex. site 1 > site 3, site 3 > site 2, site 2 > site 4, site 4 > site 1, and so on... you may have a good chance at actually improving your PR instead of hurting it.

Good luck!
trueMarketing

[SlyOldDog]

If you want to cross link your sites for informational purposes you can always use Java links as Google won't follow them. You could also tell Google to ignore your pagerank 1 site in robots.txt.

This is the safest way if you are worried about a penalty on your main site.

[cornwall]

You can probably guess what the widgets are...

Yes, its fairly clear what the widgets are. And it the widget business Google does not appear to object to cross linking.

There are many "worse" examples than just separate sites for London, New York and Las Vegas. Some of them have perhaps 50 different cities linked.

I did notice however that for example "Texas" in the widgets sites listed in Google there has been a drastic change in SERPs in the last Google algo change. A Google query for "Texas widgets" previously used to get the first 25 sites coming up from the same owner with different city sites within Texas. That happily has changed.

But at the higher level of major cities such sites still appear to have Google blessing. The sword of Damocles may be about to fall, but has not yet fallen!