Is cross linking having a negative affect on my website?
kris_p wrote:I've built over 150 websites for driving schools and instructors. On each of these sites I place a link to my main site driving-test-success.com These links have simliar anchor text and link to different pages within the site. Each driving school website is fairly well optimised i.e. added to google local, dmoz and various other directories etc. Most of them appear first page on google for their relevent keywords. The sites are split between three different servers.
From what I've been reading it seems that these links offer my main site no positive link juice. However, are they having a negative effect on my website and damaging its rankings?
It's unlikely that these are damaging at all - it's fairly common to link related sites / sites you built together. A lot of people do this without even having SEO in mind. You're right that they're likely not helping a whole lot, since the sites are probably very recognisable as all belonging to you, and could share various characteristics like hosting, registration, custom design, etc, and they certainly share an outbound link profile.
As long as your site has a good amount of other links, i.e. link diversity that goes beyond just links from this network, it will be fine.
