Removed From Google Index, and Wondering Why? - Crosslinking / Interlinking
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The latest practice that can apparently get your site added to the list of undesirables is crosslinking or interlinking. With this practice, made-for-SE sites are linked together in an attempt to artificially inflate PageRank. RLROUSE Directory offers the following explanation of cross-linking:
"Cross-linking - If your entire site is sitting at PR0, one possibility is a cross-linking penalty. Sometimes a webmaster who controls two or more websites will place links from every page of one website to every page of the other sites to increase the PageRank ofall the sites. If detected, this will quickly incur a penalty if not
an outright ban from the Google index."
For more information, you may want to point your browser to
http://www.rlrouse.com/pagerank-penalty.html
How do search engines discover the cross-linking issue? Among other indicators, factors which might prompt discovery of crosslinkage may include:
- Same content verbatim
- Same cookie structure
- Javascript function names
- Linked CSS and JS files
- CSS class names
- Same contact information posted on websites
- Common name servers
- Same/similar images and/or graphics theme
- Site hosted on same IP/block
- Whois information matching
- Alexa contact information matching
- Interlinking of domains
- Common backlinks (indirect crosslinking)
- Same credit card used for anything
- Login from same IP to separate accounts
- Residual cookies from past logins
- Similar file names or linking/directory structures
- Code Comments
It used to be considered relatively safe to have as many inbound links as possible, regardless of their source. Over the course of the past year, that assumption spawned link purchasing and hidden crosslinking. Now, sites must also be very careful about inbound links. The search engines devalued the crosslinked and purchased links networks. Sites linking to those types of networks have reported decreasing traffic, and finally, over the past month or so, a number of such sites have been completely dropped from the index.
Whether this was a manual removal or an algorithm shift can't be determined without proprietary information from inside Google, which we already know isn't possible. Remember Google's SE spam fighting philosophy: "Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts."
The crosslinking tactics used alone are consistent with those of other sites that are considered spam and may have been reported as such. If Google should target those characteristics based on spam reports for other sites, then it is not surprising that, for instance, homeboundmortgage.com would be caught by the same adjustments to the algorithm or filters, and be dropped from the index as well.
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