Hi guys, I have a thought.... Ive got about 40 dormant domains at the moment, and maybe a dozen active sites. Now if I were to use free hosting on each of the dormant domains, to produce pages (err, ok backlinks) by way of creating a directory or an auto blog, I could get a good amount of new links monthly for the sites I want. How much does google penalise free hosting though? bear in mind that I will use a different provider for each domain (or at least as many as I can find). I mean, I could use my paid hosting, but then it would be restricted to 6 IP addresses which for all intensive purposes would be useless..... whats everyones thoughts? (ps, no slagging for "black hatting" I would consider this to be a quite light shade of grey , on the basis that there will actually be content on these sites)
No, you won't be penalized, but you will be wasting your time given that those links would be of such little (read: non-existant) value that it wouldn't even be worth doing. And for the record, Google (or any other search engine) does NOT penalize free hosting sites, unless those sites in particular are violating the various search engines' terms of service (otherwise known as "acceptable use policies").
Dont matter about free hosting Just Make sure their relevent so you can get better juice. And get backlinks for the sites your useing for back links
Backlinks from dormant domains would carry little to no value unless you built incoming links to those sites for other trusted sites. Doing a link exchange will a bunch of domains with no backlinks from PR sites would be of no use. Be careful of looking like a link farm - google is a top level registrar and can check ownership of domains to see if they have one owner. I doubt they do this without some sort of flag, but you never know. Even having 40 domains cross linking and all registered with one registrar or all having whois protection can be a flag.