website A: This past December, I started the site: http://www.findsomearticles.com . It does not have an assigned PR yet, but has somewhere between 7000 - 9000 pages in the google index(There are over 140000 pages on the site). website B: A few weeks ago I started the site: http://www.findsomerecipes.com. Last time that I checked it had about 9 pages in the google index. My questions are... Should I put a Site-wide link from Website A to Website B? Could this in anyway effect the ranking of either site in a negative way? Could I put a site-wide link from Website A to Website B AND a site-wide link from Website B to Website A? Thanks for your help!
Yes, they are both on the same server. The reason that I want to Link to Site B from Site A, is because Site B barely has any links to it, because it is so new. However the only reason why I hesitated to do it, was because I read that google punishes link farms. And I wanted to make sure that this wasn't considered a link farm (I guess I am still not sure of the definition of a "link farm").
Sitewide links on sites held on the same server, same owner, therefore highly likely there will be duplicated content pages - such as about pages, contact pages etc (I haven't taken a look at your site yet, so am not 100% accurate on which pages you do and do not have). Google *may* also see this as a method of spamming - 90% of sitewide links have as much relevancy to Google as 1 backlink. Thus, I could easily fire up 100 'Adsense In A Box' type sites, with 15000 sitewide links on each site - hey presto, I'll get 1.5 million backlinks. Unfortunately, that won't work.
It will not harm your site but it won't help eather because they are on the same server. So if it's only for PR/ranking, don't bother.