Sitelinks to Sister Companies
-
Hi
We have a number of sister companies and link to them via a drop down in the footer - are these links as dangerous as anchor text links?
-
Thank you both for the responses.
The links aren't there for SEO value, more for business purposes but I'm mindful of any negative affects from Google.
-
Thanks, Highland. I didn't realize that Hayneedle redirected all of those KW domains. That was a big decision on their part. I know that the ones that I competed against were redirected but I thought they did that in a single niche only. Their Hayneedle domain doesn't rank as well as the KW domains, thank goodness.
-
Wayfair is a similar comparison. Wayfair represents a single consolidated site compared to their 200+ domains previously (under the CSN brand). I'm familiar with them since we did similar things back in the day. I'm not sure how applicable it is because we used to do the same mega-spam footers they did. The bulk of their problem (long before Penguin) was that they were what is best termed as incestuous linking schemes. What crib bedding has to do with pool covers is anybody's guess. What likely tripped them up was, back in the day, we all linked keyword rich links to the sites without any regard to relevance. Once Google catches that you have to get rid of it. A single domain is far easier to SEO for, but they probably ultimately consolidated for the sake of advertising (their ads are everywhere). But (on point with the OP) Hayneedle did 301 their old domains to their new consolidated domain, and obviously for SEO benefit. Example
I don't think it's as big a deal now because link wheels like that are long gone. I have also seen other smaller networks arise (i.e. Soap) that link between properties (in the header no less) and do not nofollow anything. It's worth noting that these networks are poorly related (camping vs diapers vs clothing) so I don't think there's any real focus on SEO there (or they just don't care). At best these links carry some minor boost but at worst they carry no weight at all. Either way, if there was a penalty it doesn't show up.
-
This is simply an opinion, based upon observations and interpretation. I don't know for sure how google views this. I don't think that anyone outside of Google knows the real answer. If anyone has their own opinion, I would like to hear it.
If you go to Amazon.com (not the Amazon.com Business site), you will see that they have site-wide links to dozens of their other retail and service properties in the footer. These go to Zappos, Diapers.com, Casa.com, Goodreads, Woot and lots more. In my opinion, I believe that these are simply viewed by google as Amazon parent company linking out to their other properties. If you go to these other properties you will note that none of them have this huge collection of links in the footer. I see other large companies linking out to their other properties in a similar way. But these are always going from the parent company out to their smaller web properties.
On the other hand, Hayneedle (a large muti-site retailer who runs over 200 retail domains) had severe ranking problems a couple years ago. This problem occurred when most of their retail sites had a huge navigation on many of their websites that contained links from lots of their retail sites to lots of their other retails sites. Hayneedle's rankings recovered somewhat a short time later, when these huge interlinking navigations were removed from their websites. In my opinion, this was viewed by Google as a manipulative linking scheme because you had sitewide links on lots of domains, each directed to lots of other domains. This was a huge number of links totaling in the millions.
In my own practice, I own multiple sites, but I don't place site-wide footer links on any of them because I think that it looks irrelevant and dumb. I also do not believe that it would have much ranking benefit at all. I believe that Google knows who owns the sites, and I believe that they have enough information to dampen your ability to promote your own sites to higher rankings with a heavy amount of "manufactured links". (All of my sites are connected to my personal google account through webmaster tools, so Google knows who owns all of them. They all also have my adsense codes on them and display ads on every page.)
I don't have fear or hesitate to link from one of my properties to another of my properties if I have relevant content there that exceeds what is available on the linking page. Does that have ranking benefit? Maybe a little. But I don't believe that site-wides between your sites are a good idea because there is a lack of relevance. And I don't believe that your visitors are going to investigate a dropdown menu in the footer to see where it goes. So, I don't think that there is any reason to do it.
-
Not really. Google is looking for unnatural links and patterns. A single sitewide footer link isn't going to impact SEO that much. If the sites all share the same server/IP Google will likely just devalue them (not penalize) and move on. If you're still uncertain you can always nofollow them.
The only exception would be if you're trying to link targeted words in the anchor (which does look spammy). Just link the site names.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Local Sitelinks
Does anyone know how organic local site links work? The examples I'm looking at are from Yelp and Angie'sList. When you run a brand search, some sitelinks reference my current location and takes me to a regional landing page. My company has landing pages for major cities across the U.S. but they never get picked up as a sitelink like this. I don't see local links anywhere on the AngiesList or Yelp homepages so I don't know how Google knows to prioritize these pages. We are also a national review site, so we have no interest in showing up in the local pack, etc. Any thoughts would be super helpful! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | healthgrades0 -
Sitelinks are wrong
When I search my website on Google, the sitelinks that I have appear to be wrong. How can I fix this? I have all of my pages optimized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | litesourceinc0 -
Shall I use a 301 or 302 redirect when people leave the company?
Hello, At my company, we have instances where client-facing people leave the company and so we need to remove their profile page from the website. As opposed to people receiving a 404 when they search for them, I thought it would be best to divert visitors to a generic landing page to explain that the person they are looking for has left the company with details on how to get in touch. I'm tempted to use a 302 redirect so the person they are searching for stays in the search results longer. But longer-term, will this cause any harm? Should it be eventually be turned into a 301 redirect? Or should I just use a 301 in the first instance. Thanks in advance, Stu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stuart260 -
Topical Sitelinks
This is a question about the non-branded, topical sitelinks SERP - i.e. those sitelinks without additional descriptive text, that tend to be shown for queries that are information centered as opposed to brand-centric. I'm been noticing an increase in these among some big brands in the travel vertical, and wanted to throw it out there to the esteemed Moz community. Are these the preserve of big site SEO/brands, or is there anything we can/should be doing to increase our chances of getting these topical sitelinks to appear? Cheers! rkdVaDN
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | linklater0 -
Google Places for Business for a national company?
A national business has one HQ. it's possible for customers to visit. Could there be any disadvantages to listing a national company on Google Places for Business? I'd see it as an advantage as they'll have a greater presence for local searches. From what I understand it won't affect the organic rankings of the company as that's a separate algorithm. There are already some discussions about this in the Q&A, but nothing I can see that's recent and concrete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?
Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them. Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain. Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy? Here is the breakdown of sites: Site1: Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products Site2: Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month Site3: Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days. Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching. Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day. Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead. Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category). We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page. FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there. Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related. Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience. Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them. We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now? How to fix it and make the Penguin happy? Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it: 1. Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd. 2. Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links". This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page. 3. On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals. Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall. Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there. Still thinking #2 above could be better? Any other thoughts would be great! Thanks, Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jab10000 -
Sitelink demotion from Google Webmaster
HI Everybody, When I search Vallnord on Google one of the sitelinks takes you to a site that does not exists. In order to avoid this sitelink to appear I Demoted that URL using Google Webmaster. Any idea how much time will this take in order to see the results? Regards, G.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Block Google Sitelinks for DSEO?
I am trying to manage DSEO for a client. The question is: would blocking a page listing from my client's Google Sitelinks cause that blocked sitelink page to be independently listed in the rankings and therefore potentially stuff a negative listing further down the rankings? Or would the blocked sitelink not show up at all in the SERPs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcmull0