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View Full Version : linking 10's of thousands of sites


qwidjib0
05-03-2006, 03:33 PM
My company maintains a free web host with the total number of accounts in the 10,000 range; due to some tactical SEO advantages our site has by default, we would probably be taking in about 5k per day right now if we could handle signups.

So recently, we've decided that in order to keep up with demand like we need to, we want to undertake an experiment of placing a header bar across all hosted web sites with advertising, to help us keep up on servers and pay the admin team this project really needs. The sites consist of both subdomains and domains, across a varying handful of IP's within the same Class C.

In doing this, it becomes only logical that we link back to our main site, for a number of logical, honest reasons. Now I've seen a number of sites in similar scenarios with massive sites of varying IP's and subdomains have great success in this area (myspace, tripod, angelfire), while other comperable free hosts in size not doing this, left out in the cold at least in terms of pagerank (ie. braven'ts freewebs.com).

But we don't do exactly what they do. On the opposing side, I've heard some pretty brutal criticism for linking lots of domains, as in this thread..

http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=33350

Now, we don't do exactly what they're doing either, but it's enough to raise some caution. Now I have a hard time believing that google could be upset with any site with 10's or 100's of thousands of links, and as a wholistic viral internet marketing approach this could outweigh any SEO concerns anyhow, but it's certainly not an easy thing to address.

I should also say that overall our pages are of really pretty good quality. We pre-screen signups for any URL's sounding dirty, offensive, spammy, or fraudulent. Every 30 days we run a maintenance script cleaning out empty accounts still displaying our default test page. And, on top of all of this, we're acting in response to abuse complaints, and at all times proactively checking out what sites people are displaying; in the end most sites really look pretty nice. All of that said, I'd love some input.

sootledir
05-04-2006, 08:02 AM
If the domains are under your control, feel free to link them however you like. Google doesn't penalize cross-linking. Look at the footer on this website and see if you can deduce any penalties to the Jupiter Media sites.

qwidjib0
05-04-2006, 03:38 PM
Well not all domains are under control - we're providing free hosting for domains.

Cristian Mezei
05-04-2006, 06:05 PM
I would advise you to link, ONE LINK from each index page of your free hosted website, to your main website, and make the rest of the links in every domain nofollow's.