Hyperlinkling to sites with the same content

Potential bad effects of hyperlinking b/w pages w similiar content.

[dnyren]

Hi Everyone,

We currently own a network of sites that are all on seperate domains with no real indication that they are related in anyway. With that being said since our sites all have PR's of at least a 5 or 6 I was thinking it would be beneficial to have hyperlinks within the content of the site's pages that would then link to another one of our domains with relative information.

Now I know all of this is fine but here lies my issue - some of these sites have the same/similiar content because we use a 3rd party to generate some of the content on the site. Could us having this similiar/same content on both websites be potentially harmful in the eyes of the search engines specifically the Big 3?

Any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

D

[LifeinAsia]

If it's considered duplicate content, it will still be considered duplicate content whether or not you do any cross-linking. If the pages already have high PR, then obviously Google already knows about them.

Will cross-linking between the potentially duplicate pages cause more scrutiny to those pages? Only Google knows. But if you do cross-link and the pages drop, be sure to share your results here. :)

[dnyren]

To clarify the above comment; currently I do not believe Google see's it as duplicate content as the sites are not related to one another. Otherwise how can I go about checking to see if 2 sites have duplicate content in the eyes of Google.

Basically what we are going to do is look at the main search term of the page they are on and then provide related links to our other sites (outside domains). The concern is that since the two sites may contain instances of duplicate content could this linking be penalized because our thinking was to with the existing page ranks of our sites we would create relevant incoming links from our other sites to increase our Back Links and ultimately our SEO.

So I guess there are two questions;

1. Could the site's be penalized for having similiar content on same pages since the websites link to one another (the duplicate pages will not be linking to one another)?
2. Will this interlinking help in terms of SEO?

[loner]

This gets me to wonder about sites using content from wikipedia requiring a link back to them.

Think it would have any value SE-wise?