3 Sites, one link directory?!?

Hi everyone,


I've made a quick observation in conducting my link exchange program and wanted to share it with some of you to gather your thoughts.

On my site I provide a form that allows users to request a link echange between our sites. Now, I realize that obtaining relevant one way links is far better then exchanging links but that's a topic for another time.

Through my link exchange program, I recently received 3 link requests from 3 different sites but that appeared to be coming from the same person. As always, I first verified that a link from each of these sites existed before adding a link from my site to theirs. While verifying these links I noticed something weird. These links all appeared to be coming from the same exact link directory yet the addresses all reflected the domain of the particular site I was exchanging links with. For example, I could find my link to site 1 from www .site1.com/resources/. Likewise I could find my links to site 2 and 3 from www .site2.com/resources/ and www .site3.com/resources/ yet in reality, the resource directory appeared to be one and the same.

My question is, how is this guy doing this and why would he want to do this? What are the benefits to him? Is this illegal in the eyes of Google?

I would assume that one benefit to this would be that he only needs to add the link once to the directory but could then turn around and say that he's actually add 3 links from his directory ... one for each site.


Anyways, just curious more than anything. I've never seen something link this before.


Thanks,
Olimess

It does seem a bit sketchy, i assume he is pulling the directory externally from another website into all 3. This could actually be dangerous... Google may consider these websites one in the same, as google does actually check IMO the whois data on the domains. I advise either keeping an eye on these websites to see if they get banned (easily done by doing site:theirurl) as if they are you will be affected for linking to them.

no links internally hurt you but links our can. you need to bare this in mind. Always bare in mind people are trying to find new ways of getting links so most can never really be trusted.

It sounds as though they're using Virtual Host Mapping, setting up the DNS of the two additional domains by creating a CNAME entry to the first domain.

oh he meant that the whole website was the same, i thought it was only the directory listings

You could be right -- either way it sounds like the 3 sites will be experiencing duplicate content issues at some point as you mentioned

3 sites on same IP or prolly similar in content and design..hmmm

The worst that happens is link gets devalued..

Dont link to such sites, coz Inbound links never hurt u, unless u reciprocate them, stay clear from such rings, and play it safe..

LKS

Thanks for your thoughts ... I thought as much. It sure doesn't seem legit whatever he's doing. I stayed clear from his link requests just in case you were wondering.