cross linking

charlie · Jun 16, 2009

I know this is a little frowned upon by the big G but can someone tell me if you have a number of pages that are all similar and have links to one another is it best to add the "nofollow" property to all cross links?
nofollow

does this really help? Is there anything else i can add to avoid punishment?
thanks

charlie · Jun 17, 2009

anyone? - i need to crack on with a template?

dashu1 · Jun 19, 2009

You mean within the same site?

I'm not sure what you mean by them all being similar?

charlie · Jun 19, 2009

the links are all to my own domains/sites in the same sector - hotels

i've noticed laterooms do it so cant be a bad idea but theres are all internal links, mine link to different domains?

retired_member21 · Jun 19, 2009

How many sites you talking about?

charlie · Jun 19, 2009

well enough to make it an obvious "link farm"

there seems to be a lot going against linking, is there really any need at this stage, google will get around to indexing at some point, i'll have to working on rank building some other way? there just seems to be too many penalties?

thanks

retired_member21 · Jun 19, 2009

< 10 I wouldn't worry too much

A subtle set of footer links isn't too bad

accelerator · Jun 19, 2009

You might find an answer here, lots of good resources:

SEOmoz | The Internet Marketing Handbook

Rgds

dashu1 · Jun 19, 2009

I wouldn't think it would be too much of a problem as long as the pages content aren't pretty much identical.

Why don't you pick 1 of the domains to be the mothership (so to speak) & have all of the others pointing at it & leave it at that for now, you could always then add links from the main one to the others once it's seen the ranking benefits.

Or have a kind of chain where A points to B, B points to C, & C to A.

I think that works better than reciprocal linking between 2 sites.

If you use nofollow you'll get no seo benefits from them (allegedly), only visitors who may/may not click the links.

charlie · Jun 19, 2009

dashu1 said:
Or have a kind of chain where A points to B, B points to C, & C to A.

i think i might do something like this, I agree this would seem a better option.

thanks for the advice guys - a small problem when working on your own is the second opinion!

retired_member21 · Jun 19, 2009

Charlie,

I reckon this may help in your quest

Some SEO myths

charlie · Jun 19, 2009

Some interesting stuff there Nick - thanks for the link

kind of saying that if youre not trying to f**k them over you'll be fine - so I guess I should be alright - i'm going to limit the number of links from each site which should help me stay under the radar.

thanks again

squarerobot · Jun 24, 2009

In my experience, Google don't automatically ban or penalise sites for things like this - they may discount the value of your cross links, but that's as bad as it'll get automatically.

You'll get problems if your site(s) get flagged for manual review by a member of their web spam team and that will only likely happen if someone reports your site. So, if you're in a competitive space - there's a good chance your competitors will be watching you and report you for anything that gives you a leg up.