Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Incestuous linking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Incestuous linking is a search engine optimization strategy used by a webmaster to promote a collection of their own web sites, or those of close friends.
Due to the domination of the search engine market by Google, and its underlying PageRank technology, sites are deemed to be more important if they have large numbers of inbound links. If those inbound links are also from highly ranked web sites, they will boost the web site further.
With the takeup of blogging and social networking sites such as MySpace, this has resulted in lots of web sites that are inter-linked and can artificially improve the ranking of a web site without merit, i.e. without valuable, or unique content.
When a webmaster has multiple sites under their control, this inter-linking is referred to as Incestuous Linking. When the sites are not directly owned, this is referred to as a web clique.