Acceptable Heavy Crosslinking

[dvduval]

Taking a look at Slashdot, Freshmeat, Sourceforge, OSDN...
it seems they are crosslinking pretty heavily with a link from every page of every site to these 4.

Would it follow then that if you crosslink only a handful of domains it is acceptable?

I can give other examples as well.

[Webmaster T]

Dave weren't all those at one time separate entitys? Weren't they just cobbled together by someone who bought 4 good sites? Don't know for sure but I know of other situations that do fall under that category. IMO, 4 distinct communities which may or may not be relevant to each other. SE determine the relevance of those to each other and when crosslinking is yada, yada... IMO, not something I want to risk but...

[Danny]

If those sites also have other individual incoming links, then i don't see any problem with it.
I suppose a good SE should be able to ignore the non-related crosslinks.

[dvduval]

another good example is clickz.com, earthweb.com, devx.com and internet.com (look at the bottom of every page).

I can give lots of other examples. It just seems that it is now okay to link sites together on every page as long as you don't link too many. It seems that 4 is a good number.

[Net Wizard]

Ive been doing it since the beginning when everybody is warning about 'cross-linking penalty'.

3 site, all related but 3 distinct services. I own 2 of the 3 sites...'never had a cross linking penalty', it seems the opposite is true...like getting a boost somehow and getting good ranking as matter of fact, home page are PR4/PR5/PR5 <- the lowest PRs the 3 sites ever got...at the highest, was PR5/PR6/PR7

So, that kind of tell you, that...if there ever was a cross-linking penalty, Google is using somekind of factor to determine who gets penalize or not.

Just, to make it clear, the cross-linking is done for the users in mind and not to fool Google. Even, without the SE, the 3 sites will remain heavily cross linked.

I think the key here is...how crucial the other site to the other site and vice versa.

Put it this way, if the 3 sites have to combine to one site then it would end up as a 'portal', community and everything. It could be this that have spare the 3 sites from cross-linking penalty.

Also, each site shows up as a backlinks to the other sites.

Cheers