Google Grey Areas

[InsanelySane]

Google has too many rules and grey areas for me to keep up with.

I saw an interview with cutts saying you can link your relevant sites to each other and this is fine.

Well where is the line between this and a PBN?

I have a thin site in the fitness niche, (lol originally I made it just to rank another site before I knew about PR and SEO).

Can I link this "relevant site" to my money site and not be sent to the dungeons? While it wont pass anything its still a super relevant link with a good anchor text.

 

[chanello]

Everything is ok if you link A>B and B>A, the problem is when you have 50-100 websites linking each other, which obviously means spam

 

[longterm]

I saw an interview with cutts saying you can link your relevant sites to each other and this is fine.

There's always a context to this kind of thing. If you have thin sites and link them to other sites for SEO purposes then there's no 'right' way to do it. You're not obeying a 'how to spam' policy by Google; you're just trying not to get caught.

Cross linking of Web sites has been a problem since December 2001; maybe a few very heavy cases were penalised even before then. Just linking a site to another wouldn't tend to be at all dangerous, but if you scale it up like chanello describes you're likely to get caught after a while.

 

[RL1213]

I was under the assumption that Google pretty much penalized backlinks on any site not directly relevant to the link. Unless you made it nowfollow.

Am I wrong?

 

[Laubster]

No, definitely not. Many sites link to other sites that are not relevant to their industry.

 

[RL1213]

So how does Google determine whether to penalize for that or not? Frequency?