Can anyone tell me if cross linking is against Googles TOS or policies as I've noticed that my competition who've 4 websites are sharing their PR between themselves to boost them in the serps. What can I do?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Basically it says do not participate in link schemes and avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. I know that goes against most seo's strategies, but I don't think Google would be too keen about websites doing heavy cross linking. This is an obvious attempt to improve search engine rankings. What you can do is submit this issue as spam to Google. If you are logged into a Google account they guarantee to at least look into the issue. If you aren't logged in, it gets lower priority and they might not look into it. http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Shouldn't be a problem. Since most of us want to "show" our sites to our visitors, that action shouldn't be classified as "a trick"... IMO
It couldnt be against in TOS, as you are not in a contract with google and google is not offering you a service. However, it could be against general guideline for webmaster offered by Google. If you want to do it, I suggest putting a rel="nofollow" in you <a> tag. You will benefit traffic but not seo juice.
if you link with the intention of gaming google, and they decide that this is what you have done, they will penalize you for it. Taking part in linkswapping (even with multiple levels of redirection A-> B -> C kind of thing) is as good as saying to google 'I think you are stupid, and I can game your results'. Go figure what Google thinks about that.