2010: Should you link between your own websites

[Elric99]

If I have several websites that are related, say a website about toasters, and another about sandwich makers, should I link between them?

Is this something that's generally done? I'm certainly not looking to 'spam', and my sites are on the same class C IPs.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[explorador]

Yes it has been done but it doesn't count that much. I don't know about all the SE but at least G distinguish if your sites are "brothers" or not, mostly via IP, but you can also have several sites on diff ips to help on this

[Demaestro]

I do it all the time, I haven't been spanked for it. If they relate then they are fine and even if they aren't I still think it is ok.

Consider a professional webmaster's own website. Lets say he hosts all his clients websites, as well as his own, and he links to his clients websites in his portfolio page... should he be penalized?

With the amount of people hopping on things like Intuit or GoDaddy then more and more sites that link each other may be linking to sites on similar ips if they use the same major host.

If Google wants to consider sites siblings it should use whois info not similar ip range, and I think they will start moving this way because of how many people use common hosting solutions.

[cnvi]

Yes link to them. Even if the links were completely irrelevant, it won't hurt you to have a couple of irrelevant links. What you want to avoid is high volume irrelevant links. Maintain relevancy always.

[Whitey]

.... don't link to the same content [ to avoid duplicate content filter ] , as said above - maintain relevance to appropriate pages [ ie don't have it all going to the home page on large sites , rather relevant targetted pages ] and apply it with caution depending on the magnitude of the cross linking.

[CainIV]

If Google wants to consider sites siblings it should use whois info not similar ip range

I would assume they already do.

Just be careful when doing this. There often is no logic or real guidelines in terms of doing it, and I have seen websites get hit for excessive cross-linking. Again, the problem being the age-old question - what is excessive?

[downhiller80]

Last year I was working on a site that had a tie-in with another site. When we launched this new promotion, overnight there was suddenly about 8000 links between the two sites. We got blacklisted pretty quickly. I realised our mistake, added rel="nofollow" to the 8000 links, and things were back up and running in a couple of weeks.

So yeah, don't overdo it, and if you have a good user-centric reason for thousands of links, nofollow them!

[brickmarketing]

You never want to interlink between your own sites too much. If you abuse it you really run the risk of having your website penalized in search. Of course it will happen naturally from time to time but if you focus your attention on it that is when you will have problems.

[pp46]

This post answered a big question I had , thanks.
But what about all my sites linking one way way to my webmaster business site with home page links? (thats 24+ links :)

[zeus]

I have noticed the last 3 years links from own sites dont count that much at all.