The Forum SEO Challenge...

@sjr4x4 I think we are in complete agreement and as an aside if you want to cover multiple keywords then have mutiple domains - it's cheaper to buy and host domains than to pay for adwords.

Just remember never to link between you own domains.

@indizine I sort of agree but here is a good working example I cna show you ...

google: the term memory foam mattresss and look at the top spot, they have the key phrase in the domain. and have suffixed it with 'zleeps' now type zleeps.co.uk into your browser and see where you end up ... quite a clever trick really.

I know that they have done a lot of work to get themselves to number one, but this little trick gives an extra boost.

google ius continually changing how they rank search results but rather than predict what they might do, better to go with what is proven and happening right now.

Not heard that one before, why not?

Because it could be construed as link farming or website farming. Which basically means using two or more websites just to increase the ranks of each other with mutual backlinks.

Lots of people do it and you probably won't be penalised but I don't see the point because reciprocal links don't carry much value anyway.

The example above with the zleep mattress site uses a redirect as opposed to a link and it's only going in one direction.

ok I can see that, but it's not always just for link juice. Take this forum, it's branded the same as our UK and US Directories, and we link to both at the top of the page, as well as each directory links back to the forum.

It's done to gel the 3 sites together, not become a link farm. Likewise big corporates, who have 10 different country specific websites, who all link to each other?

Curious as not heard about any negative stuff about cross linking your own websites, but always like to get a viewpoint from people in the industry.

I read it in a Google Webmaster help doc a few years ago, they suggested that all such links should be rel=nofollow to avoid any suggestion of inappropriate links. I can't however find any such references to it now - so I think that perhaps they've thought of a cleverer way of finding link farms.

I've only been affected by it once and then it was blatant with a big spiderweb of links from about ten sites and the google penalty was short-lived anyway.

Mind you, the thing about google penalties is you don't whether you've got one or not .... maybe you should be number one???????

lol how very true!

Nofollow tag is a myth, google follows all links and will not hide a link farm. There is a lot of confusion over "farms" these measures are there to stop people building huge networks of duplicate/spun content - see Link Farm Evo/SENuke etc. If you own several quality sites, interlinking them is not an issue. If they are all on the same ip range its probably not advised.

I was under the impression that using the Noflow tag (between your own domains) was not to dupe or fool Google but to show a clearly that your intention was not to pass on PR between the sites but merely to link them for the benefit of users.

Can you back that up? So the following quote from webmaster tools is wrong?

"How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap."
About rel="nofollow" - Webmaster Tools Help

Interesting about the sitemap though, never considered that, if you do apply the no follow tag, this will be over ruled if the same URL is in the sitemap.

I guess the keyword there is "In General" that's sort of ambiguous - but, like I said earlier, I use them to show there is no no intent to manipulate PR.