Crosslinking

cross linking between sites you own

[AhmedF]

I am a bit confused about cross linking

I own about 8 different game sites, operated independantly with separate staff, all with PR6 except for one, which has PR7.

Out of fear of 'cross linking', I have them all linking to the biggest site, which links back to them. In between them, I only have some of them linking to some of them.

Would I get a penalty or even banned if I had them all linking to each other? They are gaming, and would be listed under the 'affiliates section' so they would be valid links, but I am afraid that google would just see that as some sort of deceptive cross linking, and boom, my sites are gone.

Google is key .. sends us about 5000 a day and I do not want to overstep at all!

Would I be doing anything wrong? Or am I opening myself for trouble?

[fathom]

In all likelihood you should not have a problem, however, many webmaster "run on the edge" when it comes to crosslinking and unless you really know what you are doing, and understand the pitfalls, you will eventually one day go too far.

It would be best to do a site search here on crosslinking and learn all there is to learn particularly the pitfalls. Generalizing is a bad practice to get into.

I can't stress this enough... LEARN... no one can really advise you specifically since you know your sites and we don't.

If 5K visitors per day is important to you, you really need to read alot... don't pretend you're the expert... many here thought the same thing and ended up whining about the their "ban from Google grace".

A good place to start...

Crosslinking [webmasterworld.com]

[Waterloo]

fathom is right: One day you will go too far.

[jamesyap]

I suggest you cross links smartly. I am sure it is OK to have a partner list in each domain root page and link to all others.

If you would prefer to link from everypages to every site, then you do really need to research to see if it is OK in the forum. Ask some people and read more.

I have seen really a lots people doing cross linking and is ranked well in search results. I think it will be 1 out of 10 will be got caught doing cross linking.

[AhmedF]

Hrm ... this gets more and more confusing.

Anyone remember eFront? Where the entire network linked to everyone else?

I fail to see what would be wrong with that. These days, all those gaming 'networks' that have multiple domains link to each other on every single page, and I dont see why they would be penalised - they are cross linking, but the content is completely different, the sites are different, etc.

Also, is it considered 'cross linking' only if it is off the domain? What if you have domain xxx.com, and had subsites xxx.com/a xxx.com/b xxx.com/c ... would it be considered cross linking if those are linked to each other?