Is <link rel="alternate" ..... SPAM?

How does Google treat interlinking domains with the link tag?

[requiem]

Almost a year ago, I did some work for a medium sized company. The company had two domains one with pages in language A and and one with pages in language B.
I did a complete redesign of both sites, and I used the

<link rel="alternate"ref="http://widgetB.com/languageB.html"
lang="en" title="Widget">

to point from http ://widgetA.com/languageA.html til the page with same content in language B.

and from the language B site:
<link rel="alternate"ref="http://widgetA.com/languageB.html"
lang="no" title="Widget">

I did this with all the companys pages. Whenever there was an alternate version, I used the link tag.

Now I hear that using the link rel="alternate" is a well known spamming technique?

[edited by: heini at 8:28 pm (utc) on May 7, 2003]

[heini]

Requiem, welcome to the board.

Here speaks the w3.org:
[w3.org...]
This is per se a legit technique.
Did the site drop in rankings, are there any signs for a penalty?

[requiem]

Hello,

Both of the websites are in the Google index, with the HTML markup I did. I was hired to clean up the html, and it was what I did. Before I started both of the sites was using a mix of frames and table layout, and did not validate, when I was finished the both the sites was written i valid Html 4.01 Strict, and used CSS for layout. The company got a cleaner code, and better rankings, and everybody was happy at the time. I did not have any SEO in mind when I did the work for them, so I was ignorant of the potesial damage of the link tag.