Should I cross link my sites for better rankings?

My loyal reader Jez asks a very interesting question. I am sure the same question is on the minds of others in the same situation.

Finally, I am in the process of creating multiple sites around a similar theme. I have unique content for all sites, and will host on different servers in Europe and the US, however the whois for each domain will show my name (The company I used does not allow me to hide this info).

Is the common whois likely to make much difference when I begin cross linking the sites?

Cross linking (or reciprocal linking) in a small scale (maybe 10 to 15 sites maximum) should not be a major concern. I’ve seen many sites do it and they are ranking in highly competitive phrases. Most of their link juice comes from non-cross-linked sites though.

When you try to do this on a massive scale, things start to get interesting. I know this from experience.

Back in 2003 and 2004, I managed to get a couple of my sites ranking on Google for “Viagra” and most variations. That is one of the most competitive industries, because you make really good money as an affiliate. I got those rankings through link exchanges exclusively. Being a developer, I created scripts to ‘borrow’ links from my competitors link directories and later traded links with my sites. When I hit the 5,000 links mark, my sites got banned and I dropped in all my rankings. Back then, Google was not as sophisticated as it is now.

Later, I carefully studied competitors that were doing a more advanced type of cross linking. They created large networks of sites that they owned, and they created complex inter linking structures to boost the rank of a few of their sites for highly competitive terms. Pair.com was a common web host as they provided IP address in different class C blocks.

That worked well for a while–until Google became a registrar. It is illegal to use fake domain registration information, and by having access to the domain ownership information Google could more easily identify complex cross linking. I think they became a registrar with that sole purpose. I don’t see them selling domains in the future. They haven’t yet. Have they?

Making your cross linked domains’ registration private won’t help much either. I think registrars have access to the real information anyways, but even if I am wrong, it would be suspicious for your site to have all inbound links coming from private registrations.

There are far more complex cross linking schemes where there are a few owners cooperating in the creation of massive collection of websites with well planned link boosting structures. The funny thing is that search engine researchers have already identified most of them. Check the paper “Link Spam Alliances“, it is a very interesting read.

So, If you want to cross link on a massive scale, you better have a very intricate and complex linking plan to avoid detection.

Why Viralinks are a waste of time?

I’m new to blogging, and I’m catching up with a lot of interesting things. One of them is the Viralink, coined by Andy Coates.

I was exposed to the concept while reading John’s blog. One of the readers mentioned he was trying out a Viralink on his blog and he was getting a little bit of traffic.

What is a Viralink? A Viralink is basically a new scheme to build up the PageRank of the participating sites. The instructions at Andy’s blog explain everything better.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

Viralink

********************
********************
********************
********************
********************
********************

When I receive a ping back once you have added the Viralink to your site I will add your link to this grid, and each person who copies the grid from here will also link to your site!

Rules
No Porn Sites
Only 1 link per person (i.e don’t hog the viralink!)
Please don’t tamper with other peoples url’s
Enjoy!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

I have to admit that it is a very clever idea. By participating in a Viralink, you can potentially get hundreds or thousands of links, and a very nice PageRank.

Now, let me give you the specific reasons why I think this is risky, and pretty much a waste of time.

• There is no direct or indirect benefit for your readers. The links don’t even have text or descriptions. You can’t expect readers to mouse over the links, and try to guess from the URL whether they want to click to the linked page or not. This is simply designed to fool the search engines.

• There is no anchor text benefit. I am not sure who wants to be #1 for the highly popular phrase ‘*’.

• Search engines hate this type of manipulation. Let’s read Google’s quality guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

• Your competitor will see this and report you.

• This is very easy for search engines to detect automatically. They just need to look for blocks of links with ‘*’ in their anchor text.

Doing this is probably very time consuming. Why not spend the time creating useful content that attracts links naturally (Linkbait)?