"Funneling" links

[pas]

A: All your sites' pages link to each others' index pages.

B: All your sites' pages link to a single page/site, which has a page that links to all the sites.

Think there's any advantage to B? Chris does it with his sites and the Jalic site. I'm thinking there may be because it increases the percentage of on-topic links (most will be from the site itself). You have a single page (with probably a good amount of PR) with a single link to that site, which can then redistribute it around to all it's pages (or however desired). As opposed to a huge number of backlinks from all the other sites' pages, probably constituting a majority of backlinks, a great deal of which may or may not be related in content. Google may not be penalizing for off-topic backlinks, but if there's any sort of boost for on-topic backlinks (i.e. LocalRank), this may make a difference (if most of the other sites aren't related in topic).

[Chris]

I do B for two reasons.

1. (main reason) its completely legitimate for sites to link to a parent company, and for a parent company to link to sites. It also looks much better to have a single link on the bottom rather than a whole bunch.

2. With my number of sites I can't do it any other way without looking spammy.

[chromate]

If the two sites are well related, then link directly from index page to index page. If they're not very well related then link back to a parent company site and use that space to push the PR back out to where you want it.

If you can get away with doing the direct link, then this is better. But as Chris says, if it looks at all spammy, then go through a parent site.