We have a network of websites each of them in a separate language and a different domain coresponding to this language. Is deeplinking from the category pages of one site to the category pages of all the other sites considered as spam and can this be penalised by google? If yes how would you explain that wikipedia links in the exact similar way from one language to another? What if we will use a 3 way scheme?
If they are all hosted on one seerver with a shared IP then it might look funny but if not then why not link. Try making the linking to inner pages and more useful rather than just a straight case of Homepage to Homepage.
I would agree with SME and add you should clreate a round-robin link architecture and use the nofollow attribute to control the flow of page value.
They are on the same IP at this time but I am planning to move them. I am deeplinking the sites from a category page of one country to the same category page from other country My question was if this would be or not considered as spam by google.
One more question... Would a 3 way linking be more usefull than direct linking from one site to another?
Yes you will get busted by Google. And even if you do a "3-way". Any web site on the same IP Subnet that interlinks with another gets busted. No work around. We moved the primary domain to external hosting and created extensive one-way links to it. After 18 months, no PR change and it turned out worthless. Finally, we gave up and moved everything under the primary domain and in three months the site went up by 2PR points. In short, one large site is better than 20 small sites. ********* As for the Wiki question. Wiki is a "NoFollow" site and the links don't count for anything. Not SEO, PR or linking.
if you move the sites now to different ips it may still be worthless since google already knows where it came from. too late i guess to make the changes now. it will easily be caught by google.
If the OP use "nofollow" attribute then he will not get penalized. The fact is Google doesn't want you passing value using deceptive practices. If his site would be penalized for interlinking then what happens with sites who link from child sites to its parent site, such as linking to YourCompanySiteName.com (Goolge.com) from YourChildSite.com (Orkut.com)