Massive Cross Linking => BAD SEO

[xf_phantom]

This could be interessting for all the people with "spam footers" in their forums http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...ain-Names-Avoid-Massive-Cross-Linking-Schemes

 

[dutchbb]

It's common sense as always. I do link to 2-3 other sites in the footer, one of them with unrelated content but since he's talking about 20-30 domains I'm not concerned.

 

[Brandon Sheley]

I rarely link to any other sites from mine, via the footer or any other parts of the site.

 

[petertdavis]

I think the message is clearly that you should only cross link if the sites would be of interest to the members of your site. For example, I might cross link my stamp collecting forum with my coin collecting forum because people who collect one often collect the other too.

On the other hand, if I owned a portfolio of 30 forums on various topics like cars, guns, foot fungus, basketball, minecraft, etc... then interlinking them would not make much sense.

One thing this makes me wonder about is how much all those branding links we get stuffed into our footers by the software makers, plugin authors and so on are hurting us with our Google rankings. I wish the branding-free options were more reasonably priced since they probably don't help the devs and might hurt us who use the products.

 

[OSS 117]

Several years ago the fad was stuffing the footer with those numbered links to other sites and pages. It was totally bizarre and just came off as spammy. My sites aren't forums and aren't related to each other. I have no interest in linking them together.

My question is, if you run a network of sites, would you get penalized if you lumped them together on your network's main page? It's only one instance where they're all on one page. How much of an effect will that have with Google and their random-animal-SEO-killing-machine-program?

 

[petertdavis]

Several years ago the fad was stuffing the footer with those numbered links to other sites and pages. It was totally bizarre and just came off as spammy. My sites aren't forums and aren't related to each other. I have no interest in linking them together.

My question is, if you run a network of sites, would you get penalized if you lumped them together on your network's main page? It's only one instance where they're all on one page. How much of an effect will that have with Google and their random-animal-SEO-killing-machine-program?

If you're concerned about it, just slap the nofollow tag on those links.

 

[xf_phantom]

Several years ago the fad was stuffing the footer with those numbered links to other sites and pages. It was totally bizarre and just came off as spammy. My sites aren't forums and aren't related to each other. I have no interest in linking them together.

My question is, if you run a network of sites, would you get penalized if you lumped them together on your network's main page? It's only one instance where they're all on one page. How much of an effect will that have with Google and their random-animal-SEO-killing-machine-program?

Pls try it out and post the outcome

 

[Mr.Rick]

I had always linked to all my sites in the footer when my network was around 20 auto site strong. This is a common practice Verticalscope (autoforums) still utilizes to this day on some sites like Superhonda, but they may have stopped doing it as of 2010 when I sold them TurboDodge. There could be different reasons as to why they stopped, I am thinking as to not commercialize new acquisitions and rock the boat. It is hit and miss with them.
I was never penalized or at least was aware of any penalization.

When speaking with IB after my 2nd sell off they felt it was a bad practice to footerlink and as such they do not follow that method, they were advised from someone at Google.

I think the key was nofollowing non relevant links while leaving the others intact, but some would say no follow those too if we are talking of the footer links on every page.