Should You Link Your Websites Together?
Google put a snuff in website networks last year with one simple change to its algorithm. Does that mean that you can’t link your websites together at all as part of your link building and long term search engine optimization efforts? No, that’s not what that means.
There are legitimate reasons for linking your websites together. The practice that Google was attempting to put an end to, and which they seem to have succeeded, is using non-related sites to drive up page rank and link popularity unnaturally just because a certain group of websites are owned by the same person or company, or to prevent unnatural agreements occurring between website owners. Think about it: If you have a website on auto mechanics, another one on gardening, a third on about skydiving, a fourth one that is a literary website, and then a fifth site that is religious in nature, none of those sites have anything in common other than your ownership of them. If you did not own them there would be no reason why those websites should link together. So why link them?
Many webmasters were linking these kinds of sites together for an unnatural PR transference and Google didn’t like it. For instance, if your literary site was a PR 7 and all others were PR 5 and below, a webmaster might link to his other sites from the PR 7 site. He’d like the PR 5 site to all sites with a lower PR. Bad karma, dude.
But you might try going it like this – build a personal site or a site around your brand. Make it a branded site by just providing information about you or your company. Then link to all of your sites from that location, like it’s a hub. It will have a lower PR than the rest of your sites since it is newer. But don’t link any of your other sites together. You may or may not link your other sites to your hub. That’s up to you.
By doing it this way you are still linking your sites together, but you are doing it legitimately by making the connection that your sites, though covering separate niches, are related by your ownership. You are showing Google that you aren’t concerned with PR manipulation, rather, with making sure that your site visitors are aware of your connection to the separate niches.
12 Responses to “Should You Link Your Websites Together?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
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Re: link hub site to other sites you own. That’s what I plan to do w/my website. Except my other sites will be blogs on different subjects I’m interested and/or involved in.
Great advice.
Molly
Thanks Molly for reading, best of luck with your sites!
Thanks for the post. i want to be sure that what you said is what I understand. I have Bed & Breakfast site and I can link other sites like blogs to this site. Or is it the converse?
I am currently building my own network of sites in the hopes of increasing my PR and Google exposure. All of my sub-sites are going to be used to “funnel” traffic to my main site. All of the sites I have built so far (including multiple blogs on Blogspot) are all plumbing related. Will Google penalize my sites because they are owned by me and inter-linked?
@ Steve Brock – Thanks for your question. My recommendation would be to not link your sites together for the purpose of increasing page rank, only link if there is a connection from a user perspective…
“Many webmasters were linking these kinds of sites together for an unnatural PR transference and Google didn’t like it. ”
Not only google doesn’t like it, in recent updates many websites were banned for this.
The article provides a great tip, you should only take advantage of your other sites if they are related but don’t over do it or it might get you in troubles.
Thanks SEO Sapien for reading! Anything that is overdone with SEO will eventually lead to issues with the engines…
Hi Nick,
@ Steve Brock – Thanks for your question. My recommendation would be to not link your sites together for the purpose of increasing page rank, only link if there is a connection from a user perspective…
All of the sites are DIY Plumbing related, one site dedicated to unclogging toilets the next about unclogging sinks, and so on. The best way I can describe them “Landing Sites”.
I am linking all my mini-howto-sites together as well as linking them to my main site The DIY Plumber. Since they are all “diy plumbing” related, this be should be ok?
S.Brock
Hi Steve,
I tend to be conservative, I would say maybe link one or two and test it, but from what you have said to me you should be fine…you could always add “no follow” tags or even a robots.txt file to the links to ensure you are only linking from a user perspective…
Here are definitions to each:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard
Well… I have to agree with you… I have lot’s os friends and they also have it’s web sites and Blogs… many do not have anything related to my web site, but they add some link or even create banners that link to my web site. So… they do it because they want… so…
@ Ruben Zevallos Jr. – thanks for the comment and stopping by
If i have a site that is hosted, and buy 5 other domain names and just park them on my original domain so they are forwarded to the 1st site, does that help drive up PR or do all of them need to be hosted and not parked or forwarded to 1?