Can somebody explain to me what exactly cross-linking is, why it should be avoided, and what the penalty is for doing that?
Cross linking is when a bunch of domain most often owned by a single individual links to each other. IMO Logical crosslinking could be acceptable say for example one site of yours is selling blue widgets, you could link it to another one of your sites that is all about blue widgets. But excessive crosslinking should really be avoided. This is when you link your sites in multiple ways and doing it so, you attract a penalty from the SEs. Things might be going ok for a period of time but eventually you might find your site/s drop down from the search results or probably disappear completely. Anyways, I hope that helped a little
Thank you for the explanation. I'm actually about to do that thing, glad you explained it to me before I did so. Will it be okay then if I just assign one of my domains as my main collective and then link all my other domains there, then on each of my domain I'll just link to the main collective instead of all the other domains. Or would that be considered crosslinking as well? And what if all my domains are related to each other anyway?
You will still be cross-linking between your main collective and each of your smaller domains, so there is a small risk of being penalized. If you want to improve the rank of one of your smaller domains, you could link from the main collective to the smaller domain. You could then use a javascript link from the smaller domain back to the main collective. This will transfer any real traffic from the smaller domain to the main collective, while not exposing you to a cross-linking penalty
Linking to your other sites will not get you penalized. All of my sites link to all of my other sites and they rank quite well in the search engines. Look at espn.com. They link to nba.com, nhl.com, expn.com, etc. Those sites are all owned by the same people and guess what, they all rank really well. Not linking to your other sites for fear of a penalty would be silly.
How would the SE know that the domains are from the same person? Is this not a question of crosslinking from one IP address? I have several websites and all point to each other in a way like "our other websites" and I do not see any wrong in it and as far as I can see there is no penalty for it (yet)...but if there is I surely would like to know more why you think it is not good
Cross-linking was mentioned in another thread here at DP, and it said there that it was bad, so I wanted to clear it here. All my domains are hosted under one account at Dreamhost, but I did check if they were on the same Class C IP range, and they are not. So does that mean it will be okay for me to link to all of my other domains from each of my domain?
It wouldn't matter either way. Linking to your own domains is acceptable. Apparently, no one is listening to me...haha...
Ahh thank you, now I'll have peace of mind (And sorry about that, I didn't mean to ignore you, I was just confirming ^^;
There is nothing wrong with crosslinking - as in getting you a penalty. If you want it to count as a "vote" for your site - as in increasing SERP's, then that is a different story. The google patent talks about crosslinking to your own sites and how being with the same class "C" IP is a way they use to figure it out. "Voting" for your own site isn't the same as another site giving you a link. Google also talks about having the ability to check ownership on a domain to see if they are the same - but I do not believe they are doing this currently - at least as a general rule. Are you sure your host uses different class "c" ip's? This is usually not the case. Many people use multiple hosts for the purpose of increasing SERP's.
To share a personal experience with all of you on cross-linking: For a few years I had a huge site half on .com and the other half on .net.... Basically, the static half of the site was on .com and the forums and classifieds were on .net - this was like that for years..... The site finaly got filtered out of the Yahoo index and this is the only reason I can come up with to why ity may have been filtered... Both sites were on different servers do to their size and had different IP addresses and it was a completely legit cross link... Every page of .com linked to .net and vise versa..... Yahoo has completely filtered the site out of the index.... The site used to take all top placements for all keywords...... So, my guess, is that Yahoo either filtered it out of the index becasue of 1 - The crosslinking - or 2 - Google Ads Those are the only reasons I can think that it was removed..... I have finaly moved the entire .net half of the site including the database which generated 100's of thosands of pages onto the .com version of the site....
Ahh, I was using this tool (http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml) to check two names at a time and I only checked each of my domain paired with my main domain, and forgot to pair the rest with each other. Turns out now some of my domains were actually on the same class C.