Site A links to Site B which links to Site C

Assessing a 1 way link exchage between 3 websites

[Ride45]

Hi,
I have a link relationship with a company and the company has 2 websites. Both have thousands of pages and are on the same topic (Different site structures, although both hosted on the same IP)

Site A (operated by the company) has a link in the footer of thousands of their pages to my site (Site B)

Site B (my site) has a link in the footer of every page to site C (also operated by the company)

Site C is the company's other website. It gets the PR and backlinks passed from us..

Is this an ethical strategy? If not, who suffers?
Thanks

[martinibuster]

We don't generally discuss ethics here. We discuss link building strategies.

There are guidelines the search engines would like webmasters to follow, but that has nothing to do with ethics.

Are you asking if the above scenario follows search engine guidelines?

If that's all you have that's shady, you're probably not going to raise flags. I can think of a number of scenarios why doing that makes sense.

Would it pass a hand check... in my opinion it probably may raise an eyebrow, especially within certain contexts.

[Ride45]

Thanks for the response. Perhaps ethics was the wrong choice of words.. I meant "raise a flag"

[Bond24]

This looks as a threeway link exchange. Now adays content page links are good..