The Cross Linking Impacts – SEO Verdicts

Before starting let’s understand what is cross linking – 

Cross linking is mainly processing with the intention to raise popularity in search engine and it denotes the practice of linking between two or more sites i.e., most often, maintained by the same owner or different owners. It will act as progressive or harmful factor of your search engine popularity based on the circumstances and determinations. 

Country Specific Domains of a Company 

Cross linking will benefit your search engine popularity, if you are inter-linking several country specific domains of a single company or single owner which serves for a similar purpose. Also it will make the users to find their own country version of the company website. But remember to place the links in a non-spammy way. For example, do not place bulk country specific links in footer which makes the Google bot to think that your site is spammy. Finally confirm that bots can easily crawl your links. 

Video of Matt Cutts on the same topic -

Single Purpose Sites with Unique Content 

If you are inter linking multiple domains that serves for a single purpose and has unique content, cross linking technique will surely lend you a hand. If you are having same content for all your inter-linked sites, try to reduce the similarity for sixty percent when comparing to each other. If Duplicate contents are recognized by Google within cross linked pages this would badly affect your rankings.

Cross Linking using Anchor Text 

If you are inter-linking sites using keyword rich anchor texts, it will be more engaging to the search engine bots. It is the best cross linking strategy that helps your SEO marketing in a tremendous way. It will be helpful only if you make it right - making so many anchor texts in a single page will harm your page quality, so be thoughtful. 

Think twice if you prefer Link Rings

Link Ring - Multiple sites linked to each other in a ring form, with no other sites connected into the ring they construct. 

Link rings are one of the SEO practices followed widely in past days. However as a result of recent updates, now search engine bot will surely penalize your site if you did link rings. 

If you see the above image A®B®C®D®A, you will clearly recognize the link ring concept.

 

Hosting and IP Matters 

Although it is not a risky ranking factor for cross linked sites with unique content and relevancy, it’s wise to hosting the interlinking domains through different IP addresses and different contact information. The search engines can effortlessly find out when relevant sites cross link to each other from within the same class C IP address. These links are often cleaned out of the ranking algorithms, if spotted. 

If your website has excessive links of this type, it can even get a penalty to your site. This is the reason why a number of companies provided the service of “SEO Hosting”. These companies will sell you hosting on entirely different sets of class C IP addresses. Website owners frequently use this practice to hide their mini site networks, blog farms or cross linking networks. 

Relevancy Wins 

Cross Linking is a convenient SEO strategy to get high search engine rankings, if the sites interlinked are relevant and serves for a same purpose. Search engines give more importance to these links, if they are from relevant sites, with related content – it will benefit all your domains. If they are completely isolated in concept - interconnected blindly with the only intention of rankings and not users – then your domains will be penalized. 

Matt Cutts explaining on the same topic -

 

Cross Linking is a helpful approach for your SEO rankings but ensure that you do it in a right tactic to increase the benefits. Think of to cross link with related sites that will turn as a better usability and ranking factor. Do not over link so many sites that make it always fine.