crosslinking my two sites (help!)

crosslinking .nl / .com

[gimmestones]

Hello,

I've a question:
I own a site on a .nl-domain (dutch) and now I've tranlated my site into english and I would like to crosslink my .com-domain and .nl-domain from the indexpages of both sites.
So there will be a crosslink only from the indexpages of both websites. Will this do any harm considering search engine results (google, yahoo etc.) and google pagerank?

Note: at this point I do not have any inbound/outbound links on both sites.

Thank you...,
Dennis.

[caveman]

Conservative linking between the two, like for example just between the homepages, should be no problem at all.

Affiliated sites are allowed to link to each other, just not excessively. Only the SE's know what "excessive" is, but you are far from it witih your plan. :)

[gimmestones]

Assume I make an "ENGLISH" button/link on each dutch page to refer the costumer to the exact same page in English and vice versa for a "DUTCH" button.

a) is that artificially creating a lot of inbound links to raise your google pageranking and will you get a penalty?

b)Yahoo says you should not excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity? Isn't this the case with an "english" / "dutch" button on each page.

Note: at this point I do not have any inbound/outbound links on both sites and both sites share the same IP-address and hosting...

Thank you...,
Dennis.

[le_gber]

as caveman said, crosslinking the homepages should be fine.

Cross-linking all the pages to their english / duch counterpart is very risky (me think) especially if you do not have any other inbound/outbound links.

[canadafred]

Cross-linking the equivalent content in two different languages seems like a natural need that some of your web visitors may require. The option to offer the content in another language could mandatory. You seems to be thinking of your web visitor's interests first rather than the search engine’s opinion of the web pages.

That is good because the search engines guidelines also instruct us to think of out web visitor first.

In your case, it seems to me that you want to create product pages that link to their linguistic alternative. Sounds harmless. If all you have is one link per page that offers an alternative translation to another web page elsewhere then surely it should have little negative effect to the web page's search engine ranking.

If however, you think you can create a page filled with reciprocating links, then, naturally, it should not perform well in the rankings.

[Whitey]

as caveman said, crosslinking the homepages should be fine.
Cross-linking all the pages to their english / duch counterpart is very risky (me think) especially if you do not have any other inbound/outbound links.

If all the cross links are between different URL's [ pages ] and with completely different content it shouldn't be a problem, from my experience. I'd consider this conservative, if it's appropriate for the user.

Yahoo doesn't like an entire site linking to the home page, in fact I've seen it tank the referring site.