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July 19th, 2009 
QuadsZilla Most all of us have multiple websites. It’s a hazard of the trade.
Last week I mentioned that no matter what you’re doing SEO-wise, it’s a bad idea to interlink your entire network. Remember: A network bann is just a human reviewer’s incling away.
So someone asked: “What exactly do you mean by don’t Interlink your entire network.”
On the most basic level it’s this:
If I can start at any of your sites and, just by clicking, eventually get to all your other sites, then you’re doing it wrong. The shorter the click distance between all of your sites, the more vulnerable you are to blanket treatment.
What is click distance? Click distance is the minimum number of clicks it would take you to get from one page to another.
The most common form of this SEO Faux pas is the person with 5-30 sites, who puts the same footer on every page of all of his sites, that link to every site he owns. Why do people do this? Because Google let’s this WORK for ranking for long periods of time. Then all of a sudden, you get wacked and don’t know why. Why? Because you gave away your entire network.
It’s actually frustrating sometimes to be outranked by these hacks while waiting for Google to fix the total junk in their SERPs.
So the bottom line is this: While Interlilnking your entire network may appear to help your rankings, over time the penalties (especially if you are doing anything shady) will outweigh the benefits.
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Any ideas how to recover from this sort of Google penalty
This is a little confusing. The whole idea of your link pyramid was that each level linked to the above level. Now I understand you’d want to keep everything linking only in one direction (up) and not interlink within one level, but at the top of your pyramid sites one site, so you could click around and get to all your other sites. It might take 4 clicks down to the bottom level, but you could always get to all sites from the very top, correct? The whole idea of a link pyramid is that at some point they all do link to the very very top site?
Thanks for the post Quads. I liked your reference to click distance. You explained the problems with interlinking very well – on the most basic level.
However, if you are dealing with the bottom level of a linkpyramid scheme, you still want to do some interlinking, right? So in order to not risk the whole bottom level, you would break it down into chunks. In terms of risk vs reward, how big should those chunks of sites be ? Splitting those 300000 sites into 300 to 600 chunks of 500 to 1000 sites, or would it be better to go for chunks of 5k, 10k or even 20k sites ?
Would love to pick your brain on that one.