Can anyone offer advice on site linking? We built a home catalog site for a local real estate agent and over a 9 month period we managed to attain a #2 ranking for an extremely competitive phrase in Costa Rica. We've built a second site for them that pulls in database records from the first site. I'm very concerned about the appearance of related site links.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

If you don't promote the second site in search engines, then it's a non-issue.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

I'm not really sure other than that what you're referring to by "related site links"? Are you referring to the related: operator within big G? Or are you referring to Site 1 saying that Site 2 is a useful resource?

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

If you don't promote the second site in search engines, then it's a non-issue.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

I'm not really sure other than that what you're referring to by "related site links"? Are you referring to the related: operator within big G? Or are you referring to Site 1 saying that Site 2 is a useful resource?

Thanks for the reply -

By related site I mean two sites linking together on the same server that some SE's may consider an effort to build our own link farm. I had a client a while back that asked me to help him get off Yahoo's blacklist because he had 10 sites on a server all linking to each other... (bad move). I don't even want to take one step toward a questionable linking arrangement.

Two sites shouldn't really pose any significant issue. After all, there are too many shared IPs and too many possible ways in which related sites could link to each other that way without the webmasters knowing each other.

Again, if you really wanted to play it safe, you could either nofollow the links back and forth or ensure that one site doesn't get indexed. The robots.txt code I provided above will take care of that, but be careful and only use it on the second site.

The additional benefit to nofollowing the links is that you'll have a more accurate measure of the traffic going to and from those links via your stats.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Two sites shouldn't really pose any significant issue. After all, there are too many shared IPs and too many possible ways in which related sites could link to each other that way without the webmasters knowing each other.

Again, if you really wanted to play it safe, you could either nofollow the links back and forth or ensure that one site doesn't get indexed. The robots.txt code I provided above will take care of that, but be careful and only use it on the second site.

The additional benefit to nofollowing the links is that you'll have a more accurate measure of the traffic going to and from those links via your stats.

Superb info! Thanks for the insight.

That's why I'm here. I'm the WMT sledgehammer.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Two sites shouldn't really pose any significant issue. After all, there are too many shared IPs and too many possible ways in which related sites could link to each other that way without the webmasters knowing each other.

Also I would think if you wanted to build your own link farm it would be just as easy to set up sites with several cheap hosts to avoid this issue. Meaning the big G probably doesn't pay it a lot of mind.