Google's Matt Cutts Warns About Linking Too Many Sites Together

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video answer to the question "If I have 20 domains, should I link them all together?"
The short answer is, most likely no - you should not link them all together.
As I explained at Search Engine Land with my article titles Google's Matt Cutts: Linking 20 Domains Together Likely A "Cross Linking Scheme" - it may be considered by Google as a cross linking scheme - at least those are the words used by Matt Cutts.
Here is the video:

As you can see, the overall theme and feeling you get from Matt is that it is typically a bad idea.

So the next question I will hear is what about linking 18 sites, or 15 sites, or what about 10 or 5 sites together. I love those questions. Those asking those questions are linking the sites for one purpose, ranking.

So what about it? :)

Source : Google's Matt Cutts Warns About Linking Too Many Sites Together

Image credit to BigStockPhoto for circle of chains

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8 Weeks Later, Google To Release Panda #25

As I reported in my live blogging last night and on Search Engine Land - Google's Matt Cutts announced a Panda refresh is coming this weekend. Either this Friday, March 15th or this Monday March 18th.

It has been 7 weeks since the last Panda refresh, version 24. So when this actually pushes out, it will be closer to 8 weeks since that last update.

We've speculated a few weeks ago that Google would go on with tradition and release a 4 week update at the end of February but that did not happen.

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Google Update Brewing? March 2013

The ongoing Webmaster World thread has a huge spike in chatter over the past 48 hours with speculation around an update.

In the past 48 hours or so there have been over 100 new posts in the thread, all around webmasters and SEO asking if there was some sort of update.

There was a Google attack on a link network recently, which may be related. Normally when Google breaks down a link network take some time, so sites would see the results (i.e. a downgrade in ranking) over the next few days.

But this may not be related to the link network crack down.

It seems many are suspecting a Panda update. We are indeed due a Panda update, it's been almost 7 weeks and we average a Panda update every 4 weeks or so.

Did you see signs of a Panda update?

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Confirmed: A Panda Refresh, Version #23

Update: Google has confirmed that this is a Panda refresh. This would make it version 23 and it impacted about 1.3% of English based queries.
I should note, I am shocked they pushed out a refresh before the holiday seasons. Last year they promised they would not do a Panda update before the holidays. What a difference a year makes.
A week ago, we reported on some very strong signs of a Google Update last Thursday. Google told us there was no update, not Panda and not anything. Webmasters feel Google is either lying or are clueless
That being said, there are now new reports in the same WebmasterWorld thread of an update hitting a few hours ago in the Google search results.
Someone even asked me on Twitter if there was a Panda update:

New Panda data refresh rolling out: ~1.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Background: goo.gl/rvMZj
— A Googler (@google) December 21, 2012

In the WebmasterWorld thread, here are some of the posts:

Looked like something got rolled back to me. My positions have all reverted to where they were last week.

There has been some shuffling overnight (in which my main key term page has gone from page 2 to page 4).

Now it is really early and the reporting tools have yet to report as of this morning, including MozCast, SERPmetrics and SERPS.com. Although, since this seems to have been updating early this morning, the tools may not show anything until tomorrow.
Google has confirmed a Panda refresh impacting 1.3% of queries!

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Rumor: Google Panda Update #21 On October 17th? Nope.

Last Wednesday or late Tuesday night, October 16th or October 17th, Google may have pushed out a Panda refresh. If so, this would be Panda update number 21.
Update: Google implied that there was no update around this time frame.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has an uptick in Google webmaster communication on October 17th. One said, "My spidey sense tells me something rolled through at some point yesterday(16th)."
Also, a reader sent me some charts showing a Panda recovery on several of his web sites. He actually sent me several and they all seem to show the same pattern. They all had very little traffic and then several jumped up on October 16/17th.
The only monitoring service that shows a major change around those dates is SERPmetrics, but MOZcast and SERPS.com do not show major changes:
The previous Google Panda update was on September 27th, version #20. So time-wise, it is possible there was an update.
I will reach out for Google for confirmation on these rumors.

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