Crosslinking Google penalty?

[rallport]

Hi,

While reading about seo, I came across an article that mentioned Google possibily penalising crosslinking to sites hosted on the same server. I've read the matt cutts article - Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses - but this is from 2006.

E.g. I use the same host (as I'm sure a lot of web dev companies do) for all my websites and usually place a link to my main site in the footer of my web sites, with my main keywords in the link text. Is this being discounted by Google because they are all hosted in the same place?

Does anyine have any up to date sources?

Many Thanks

 

[Alien]

Hi RP,

I don't have the answer, but I'm sure a lot of the guys with expert SEO knowledge here will do.

I'm interested in your question too as my sites are all hosted on my dedicated server and cross-linked between each other (quite naturally) too, so will listen with interest what is said here!

 

[accelerator]

Put yourself in Google's shoes. It interprets a link as a "vote" for a website. Google spends a lot of time developing it's algorithm so that it will identify which links are really "votes" and which are artificial. So, it wouldn't take much thought on Google's part to say that links from the same IP aren't as valuable as links from different IPs.

If you're running a respectable site, why not contact me for a link exchange?

Rgds

 

[peacock]

Hi,

E.g. I use the same host (as I'm sure a lot of web dev companies do) for all my websites and usually place a link to my main site in the footer of my web sites, with my main keywords in the link text. Is this being discounted by Google because they are all hosted in the same place?

Does anyine have any up to date sources?

Many Thanks

Footer links are pretty much discounted anyway.

 

[lukeeales]

Footer links are pretty much discounted anyway.

I've seen lots of sites ranking purely based off network-wide footer links for reasonably competitive keywords, so I wouldn't say they are discounted by any means. Their value may be damped due to block level analysis, but of course it then depends how you decide to serve the footer, and what actually makes a "footer" in search engines' eyes.



There will be no penalty for the scenario put forward by the original poster; however, the value of the links is likely to be decreased as the search engines determine the sites are owned by the same organisation.

Obviously there are ways to try and obfuscate this - different servers, different IPs, different link profiles, different WHOIS details, etc.

 

[peacock]

Thanks for info' Luke.

PS like the look of your Christmas Holidays site.

 

[jimm]

Equally are Google going to really put more pressure on the fast declining pool of IPv4 addresses by putting more value on links from different addresses?

 

[rallport]

Thanks for info' Luke.

PS like the look of your Christmas Holidays site.

Just sent a review to your wordpress hosting website

 

[jj1]

I'm not a SEO expert but most of the links for my pr2 web design site come from other websites I've designed and I have noticed that - coincidence or not - my serps position has risen as I've added new sites. With the exception of a few ezines, most of my other links come from sources that some seo or other discredits (eg squidoo, social bookmarking, directories, forums, blog comments etc)

I would say that - at the moment - footer links do help. I do however make sure that I don't link back to these sites as I once did in my porfolio page.