Managing Network of Websites: Link Popularity Issues

How to pursue a deligent Link Strategy with 100+ websites.

[hawk]

Dear All,

We are managing a group of 100 sites and the number is expected to double shortly. I am sure we all realize the importance of link building, however there are various problems associated with this tedious exercise, especially, when you're managing a large group of sites that are regularly evolving. I am listing a couple of my concerns and would appreciate your due feedback.

1) Lately, Google has removed many of the backward links from most of our sites. Clearly it has penalized them. The most probable reason might be its' identification as a group and hence treating them as spam and hence this penalty. How to keep doing quality link popularity with a group of websites and not getting penalized. I feel it's advantageous for one link partner to have his/her site added on one page of all my sites and whereas having all those group of websites added on his websites on one page i.e. a page or two dedicated on my websites. Google will be able to easily identify these as it will find many more such pages. Your feedback?

2) I am using ARELIS to manage the links. Is there any better tool that can actually check all my link partners and confirm me that who all are linking and the defaulters? I don't think it is advisable to take help of software that uses a search engine to do this exercise since it will only include the search engine's database.

Senior/Preferred members and other people advise.

Best Regards

[cbpayne]

" Lately, Google has removed many of the backward links from most of our sites. Clearly it has penalized them. The most probable reason might be its' identification as a group and hence treating them as spam and hence this penalty...."

How do you know that Google has done this? The backlinks commond from Google has never shown all links (it used to only show those above a certain PR threshold), but a recent canned email from Google refered to the link: command only returning a "sample" (Google's words) of backlinks (my best guess for the criteria is now more than a PR threshold). I would not jump to a conclusion that you have a Google penalty if they do not show up.

My understanding is that if the page that the link is from is in the Google index and Googlebot can follow the link, then they are taking it into account.

[dirkz]

cbpayne is right. I wouldn't think of penalty until SERPS get considerably worse.

I am using ARELIS to manage the links

I don't know Arelis but could be that it's against Google's guidelines ("Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.")

If you use such schemes, make sure it is not detectable from looking at a page.