Have I broken the rules?

[spaceshipsandlaserbeams]

I am not an SEO by any means and would appreciate any advice I can get as I try to understand this field just a tiny bit better. I own an Etsy shop and have a blog that promotes my products (party supplies) and feature birthday parties that have been thrown by moms/party planner, etc. I've been fortunate to meet a group of great blogging friends in my niche along the way. Every Friday,  we have been sharing one post from each other's blog in a round up post to try and drive a bit of traffic to each other. Is this something that would be penalized by Google?

Thanks so much for your time.

[julianhearn]

Hi Stephanie,

Firstly, google doesn't really have "rules", instead they publish "webmaster guidelines", you should read and understand them, see here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

In the purest sense yes you have broken this guideline:

"Avoid participating in link schemes"

Read here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

I don't think you and your friends intended to "manipulate your site's ranking in Google", but that is how it looks to google, you intended to sent traffic to each other from your current readers.

Another problem is duplicate content, it sounds like your group is publishing the same content on each other's sites. This is not good, please stop and also consider going back and removing all duplicate content, just leave the original live.

I assume you are posting here because your traffic and rankings on google have dropped is that correct?

Finally, I think you need to keep your blogging friends but also to make some new ones. If there are 10 blogs in this group and you all interlink to each other and on a regular basis it isn't going to look good in google's eyes.

[spaceshipsandlaserbeams]

Thanks so much. Very helpful.

No, there's no drop in ranking, I'm just learning more about SEO and realized what we believe is community building (we're all in the same niche) might be frowned upon.

[spaceshipsandlaserbeams]

I have been thinking more about this and I have a follow up question - if it's not too much of an overstep. These weekly round up posts I do are actually quite popular, they get shared socially, I get blog comments, etc. Everyone writes their own post that fits with their particular blog. Is there any way where these weekly group roundups work? It seems a shame to stop it. I just want to make sure we're doing more good than harm.

[julianhearn]

Rounds up posts are just fine. The problem is if they are is a close group of people who just recommend each other, it looks un-natural. E.g. these are fine:

http://www.threethriftyguys.com/2013/05/friday-finds-510/

http://coolmaterial.com/roundup/friday-link-roundup-123/

Its find to recommend your friends, but not all the time. Also once you have a few links from a site additional links from the site site become less valuable so you want to have a bigger a bigger pool of sites that link to you.

[julianhearn]

Also the link to spaceships and laser beams from this page is mis-formed http://www.thislittlemama.com/2013/03/21/stephanie-keeping/

[spaceshipsandlaserbeams]

Probably no better proof we are kid's party bloggers trying to pick up a bit of knowledge and not SEOs Ha! Thanks for pointing that out - and so generously giving of your time.