Cross Linking Filter
 

Hey guys I need your advice on this one...

Background:

I help run a big directory website. The directory is seperated by city (we have over 20 cities currently) Each city has a seperate domain name (example: newyork-advertising.com or lasvegas-advertising.com). We have a main advertising site (advertising.com) that has a map that links to all of our cities. Each city also links to all our other cities down at the bottom of the page. So this is a heavy case of cross linking, but we do it for our visitors, so they can easily switch to different cities. (our competitors do it as well)

Before the big florida update we were number 1 on google for about 2 years, now we can barely make 1st page.

Situation:

I just read an article that talked about googles new network filter. I guess it frowns upon big sites that cross link, such as we are doing. But I heard it only frowns when each site is on the same ip, they think it looks like spam.

Our top 2 of our 3 top competitors also use seperate domain names for their cities. I was curious and checked the whois on a few of their domain names to see if they were on the same ip as well. It turns out all their seperate domain names are on different ips, but all those ips run to the same single server.

So finding this, im immeadiaetly thinking that this is the reason why our site really tanked. We have been researching and pulling out our hair since november, because our competitors are not doing anything different than us that we notice. (Besides this new finding)

1. Does anyone have any experience with this situation?
2. If it is because our sites are all on the same ip, how long would it take google to recongnize each site as a seperate ip once we seperate them?
3. Even if we have each site setup with a different ip, does google notice that all those ip point to the same single server?

Thanks in advance

Tony

Anybody?

Read the SE stratergies conference London I think it went over that http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=84354