I have a product review and info website thats rather board. I thought to seperate the product segments its different sites. This would also help my SEO by cross linking site names and some products.

www.compacttractorreview.com
www.farmequipmentreview.com
www.constructionequipmentreview.com
www.lawnequipmentreview.com

seemed like a good idea at the time, so I went with it. I am now second guessing myself. I have been online for about 8-9 months, I get far more spidering from yahoo and msn than I do google. I am wondering if it does not like the way the sites are setup and the amount of content that appears like its duplicated.

This is not a full time endevor for me, to keep my costs down I am hosting on a residential comcast cable line. 256k up is fine for my rather low traffic volume, I will move hosting when the traffic justifies it. I wonder if the engines know this is a comcast IP range and dock me for that.

Would I be better off changing my format and wrapping all the content into once site?

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http://www.compacttractorreview.com
http://www.messicks.com

I would suggest that this can be some kind of a problem. I do know that Google pays special attention to what it calls "Link Farms" or any scheme of interlinking. As this is one are they specifically look for, and considering they pay millions of dollars in sallaries to some of the best PHD guys in the geek world I would guess they could find out these are all connected and probably are penalising you somehow.

It is just a guess, especially as you are probably doing it in a very non specialised manner.

Better wait until one of the gurus around here pops in with an expert answer.

if you set up a link network you would want to have many sites from outside of your link network linking into it to make it look like a natural part of the web.

as far as how much you can get away with...that depends on how popular / powerful your sites are.

I have a bunch of sites...the biggest thing is you will primarily only want to cross link where logical and make the sites look like each site has a legit purpose to a human visitor such that it does not look like they were set up expressly to deceive search engines.

also you may want to host the sites at various locations and register the domains via proxy if you intended to do sketchy stuff.

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I'm Feeling Lucky!
SEO Book: blog, news, random stuff & a Search Engine Optimization Ebook Search Engine Marketing Tips & whatnot

Hi SEO book, from your posting it looks like your suggesting that google can pick up if sites are hosted on the same IP band range/or hosting provider, and they might do a check or have some mechanism to check against registered owners at the whois database.

I'm not quite sure where to go. At first I thought this would work because I was not going to link to the other sites in any way besides just the main index pages and I was going to keep the content site and industry specific. As I did more development I found out how impossible that was going to become. I did just jump to PR3 not too long ago and I have about 160 back links. I am just concerned by how little I see googlebot. Its hit and miss, today google took about 60-70 pages, tomarrow it might be 2-3. Maybe this is typical for PR3? I don't know.

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http://www.compacttractorreview.com
http://www.messicks.com

if you want to do really well on the web you want to either use really focused sites and / or get lots and lots of links.

I have crossed links a good # of sites and have not got penalized for it. I have a bunch of links coming into a few of my sites though so I am not certain that I am the best resource as to determine exactly when a cross link penalty will occur because I have never had one. I know you want to keep it like under a dozen and try to get many links from outside your network pointing into various sites in your network.

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I'm Feeling Lucky!
SEO Book: blog, news, random stuff & a Search Engine Optimization Ebook Search Engine Marketing Tips & whatnot

I think your best advice to follow is what SEO book said in the first place.

1. Put your sites on different servers if you want. (lots of cheap space available) *we have three servers ourselves*.

2. Make your domains "anonymous" this should be offered as an extra service

3. Get few more inbound link through listing in directories that are free, posting on forums, few bloggs etc.etc, few link exchanges

Then pretty much you should be ready to roll, but if you say you are getting googled every day, then I can't see the problem, you can't expect to get googled as often as if you had page rank 5.