A blog that points to other blog posts written about that blog

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Think of it like testimonials or reviews. It`s good to help highlight the person. I wouldn`t have it link out to everything written, but a select few is a good idea imho.
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  Chase Reiner: Furthermore, it`s my belief that when google sees you`re linking back to a site that`s linking to you it dilutes the value of that link
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Yeah so what is the volume? When you say "It`s every link", how many links? How many links per page, how many links across the site? How many pages does the site have overall? How many other sites link into this site? How many links are there overall, coming from those domains? How high is the quality of those other sites this one links out to? How high is the quality of all the links pointing in and all the domains those links come from? This all matters, because degree of harm is based on the full picture understanding, where it could be a natural pattern or a toxic, overwhelmingly artificial pattern.
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  Chase Reiner: I think we`re having a breakdown in communication. Let me reiterate. Here we have site A (clients website) and site B (different article publishers) Step 1: Tons of different site B`s write an article about site A and link to site A (let`s say over 20 have been written) Step 2: Site A then puts article preview into it`s own blog with preview of site B`s post linking back to every site B. So if you were to click on site A`s preview of blog post which looks like that article is on site A`s site it then takes you to one of the many B sites. This has been repeated for every single post to site A. I don`t know about you guys but to me it looks like (even though it`s not) reciprocal link building which in my conception was frowned upon by Google.
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  Jim Munro: I think you are giving Google too much credit, Chase Reiner. Just how much computing power do you think they have got? :)
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Chase thanks for refining the message - I understand now. What you describe is ENTIRELY valid, and non-toxic. There is ZERO chance it`s going to be frowned upon by Google. Think about it - as is the case with most SEO concepts - what would normal behavior be if SEO didn`t exist? In this case, it`s called brand reinforcement, and Public Relations, to boost marketing and sales. If I`m mentioned in the SEO industry on fifty articles, you damn well better believe I`m goint go tweet and post to facebook every one of those and link to them. If you set up a site properly, and the site is large enough, you can even call the section where you link out, the Media section or "In the News". Now let`s talk about other things you`ve mentioned. - Reciprocal linking. Sure - if you link out to every site on the internet that includes a link back to you, and it`s a large volume scenario, that may very well likely potentially be perceived as reciprocal linking. Yet what are the signals as to how those original links came about? That still matters. Are the links in to your site really high quality, and diverse in the content, topics, anchor text, placement on sites in different areas of those sites? All of that matters to that equation. Do the majority of other sites those sites link to also have return links? See - scale can imply or result in artificial patterns and reciprocal linking then can be an issue under those narrow circumstances. Does your site only link out when there`s a link coming in? Artificial pattern. Except I`m going to give you one more fact here. If each news preview you say this site A has is contained in its own blog post, that is probably TOXIC itself, due to thin, extremely thin, or perceived thin content across the full scale of all of those otherwise identical blog posts. When linking out from a "media" or "in the news" place on site A, it is best to either: 1) have just one long page with a short snippet of crawlable text about each such off-site mention, that then links to those places; or 2) write full, properly unique individual pages for each one individually where each of site A`s individual pages in this section can stand alone as a quality page from an SEO perspective; or 3) noindex, nofollow is the appropriate tag for those otherwise "worthless" pages from an SEO perspective, yet where those pages are potentially helpful to site visitors as far as brand awareness and PR reasons go.