“Sister” Website Linking Explained
Successful companies that do good business online rarely own just one domain. The reasons for this are various. In some cases, companies want to expand into a franchise and want to have a separate website for each one. In other cases, they could be websites that are merely intended for different countries or websites with completely different purposes but under the wing of the same parent company. This raises the question on how to manage interlinking between these websites. Are they viewed as natural links and in which cases are they viewed as unnatural?
What makes this an important issue?
Well, having natural links leading to your website is one of the best ways to boost both your traffic and domain authority, if done properly. I have to stress the word “naturally” here, since link building can cause more harm than good if it turns out to be spammy. All major search engines will impose penalties on any website that forces link building in places that are outwardly illogical. For example, if you own a website that sells construction safety equipment, it would make absolutely no sense to link it within a blog post located on a blog that has absolutely nothing to do with safety or construction. Even in cases when it does, it is still not a good idea to link your landing page (product page) since you are not actually providing a resource for further reading. The keyword here is value. You are basically scamming the readers into checking out your products or services. This is why most well-established websites have a blog which they populate with niche related posts that are true resources and this allows them to avoid getting penalized for link building.
This is why link building between websites sends mixed signals to SEO specialists since, by extended logic, no value means site penalties.
Google’s take on things
We all know that Google’s specialists are artistically vague when talking about how their ranking system actually works and what parameters they use to determine optimal ranking for a website aiming to position itself for specific keywords. Nevertheless, they have recently “answered” the question of how sister website interlinking is done properly.
This question was answered by Google’s Engineer Matt Cutts in a Google Webmasters help video. In order to make things clear I am disclosing the exact question he was giving an answer to:
“Is there any way Google identifies “sister” websites? For example, relationships between ebay.co.uk and ebay.com? Does linking from one to the other is taken as paid or unnatural? And I’m strictly talking about good, genuine ccTLDs (country code top-level domain) for businesses.”
So, in layman’s terms, there are no penalties for obviously related websites with ccTLDs variations but in order to make sure Google doesn’t make a mistake (which has been known to happen) and to make it easier for them to identify it as logical interlinking, you need to help them out a bit. There are three ways you can do this and none of them are too complicated for developers to handle. But this only goes for ccTLDs and hording websites which all deal with the same subject and have very few things that distinguish them from one another is still going to be considered as spam.
Things that were left unsaid
Although this helps us understand how to handle things in this specific situation, there are still tons of things that are left unclear. For example, if you own multiple domains that are not just .com and .gb (or insert desired country ccTLD) variations but separate websites that offer different things, is it a “transgression” to put up links on each one, leading to other websites since you would obviously want to tell the users, who are satisfied with your products or services on one of them, that you own other websites. Basically, this would mean that you would like to make a sort of a “trust bridge” between these websites and use the trust you have earned by doing good business on one of them to boost the others. A similar situation happens on pinterest where people who focus different types of boards still want to promote their other accounts by offering them the opportunity to get familiar with their other work based on quality and approach which makes a lot of sense. This only natural as a part of their pinterest business strategy and this should also be an option for websites as long as they really provide the same level of service and the same approach.
As usual, all we can do is wait for SEO specialists to test things out and draw our conclusions from their experience or, who knows, we might get another deeper explanation from Mr. Cutts. Until next time, good luck.
