Is Inter-linking websites together good or bad for SEO?
-
I know of a website that inter-links a handful of websites together (ex- coloring.ws interlinks to a handful of other sites, including dltk-kids.com, and others).
Is this negative for SEO?
I was thinking about creating a few related sites and inter-linking all of them together, since they will all be relevant to each other.
Any thoughts would be great!
-
Google's advice on this is a bit vague, and the practical consequences can vary a lot. Linking together a couple of sites is usually fine - linking together dozens or hundreds could get you marked as a link network and get all of your sites penalized.
Usually, as Richard and James said, it's more that Google will simply devalue the links, especially if those sites share ownership/hosting/etc. It's just too easy to cross-link your own properties. I don't think getting too fancy with hosting, C-blocks, etc. is the answer. That's a lot of work, and Google can still connect you on ownership and other cues. To erase all of those cues is a lot more time, effort, and money than links from a couple of sites are really worth.
The best advice I can give is that, if you cross-link, do it in a way that's clearly of value to users. In other words, just linking these sites to each other in the footer is almost going to guarantee that Google ignores those links. If, however, you can link specific content to directly relevant content on another site, they're much more likely to let those links carry equity, and that's going to be valuable for your visitors and let them usefully traverse your sites. So, think of it more as a CRO task - how can you get visitors from one site to meaningfully engage in and convey on your other sites? If you can do that, and if you're only talking a handful of sites, you have some chance at making those links carry value.
-
What about subdomains?
Would that be more beneficial?
The idea is to have a few relevant sites inter-linking with each other, because each one focuses on a specific niche. Putting all of the niches into one site isn't ideal, let me know your thoughts on subdomains, something like what http://www.got-free-ecards.com/ does (http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/)
-
To be honest if it is all on the same sever with the same hosting information ect, if it not going to do much benefit from a long term point of view. I tested your site in one sever tracking tool and it shows up all the sites on the same hosting IP been 98% similar (Google would see the same data) that answers the reply above is it on the same C-Class.
| <a id="mfa99" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa100" class="domain-name"></a>kidsrcrafty.com | 98% <a id="mfa101" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | > 1 million |
| <a id="mfa115" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa116" class="domain-name"></a>www.dltk-kids.com | 98% <a id="mfa117" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | > 1 million |
| <a id="mfa137" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa138" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-bible.com | 98% <a id="mfa139" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | Jan. 26, 2002 | 96566 |
| <a id="mfa154" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa155" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-teach.com | 98% <a id="mfa156" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | Nov. 2, 2002 | 115330 |
| <a id="mfa172" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa173" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-holidays.com | 98% <a id="mfa174" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | Oct. 16, 2002 | 230480 |
| <a id="mfa188" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa189" class="domain-name"></a>coloring.ws | 98% <a id="mfa190" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | 43523 |
| <a id="mfa204" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa205" class="domain-name"></a>kidzone.ws | 98% <a id="mfa206" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | 55624 |
| <a id="mfa218" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa219" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-poems.com | 98% <a id="mfa220" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | > 1 million |
| <a id="mfa229" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa230" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-enfants.com | 54% <a id="mfa231" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | | > 1 million |
| <a id="mfa235" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa236" class="domain-name"></a>makinglearningfun.com | 52% <a id="mfa237" class="expand-indicator expand"></a>reasons why | April 2, 2006 | 178965 |
| <a id="mfa241" class="domain-name"></a>[+] <a id="mfa242" class="domain-name"></a>dltk-ninos.com | -
If you go that route, make sure to use different hosting companies or at the very least get different C-class IPs.
Interlnking sites is generally not that effective, a single link from an authority site will carry much more weight. You are better off spending your time contacting authority sites within your niche to get a link somehow (guest blog, get you featured etc)
If say you have 10 PR 1, DA/PA of 15 linking to 1 site. A single authority DA/PA of 35 and PR 3 would carry more weight than all of those combined.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
Hello, I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains. We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org. As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these? I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore. Many thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | e.wel0 -
Disavow or not? Negative SEO
Since last November we have been receiving a lot of low quality backlinks from over 700 websites. It looks like one of our pages from our website has been copied with the links being kept as they are. I have left a link to an example of this here: https://goo.gl/eWQODJ Please note, all examples seem to be copied in the same way. We have also started seeing a decrease in the amount of organic traffic (Analytics Picture), As you can see the decrease is not yet so drastically high, but it is still a decrease and this is the third consecutive month we have seen this decrease. Do you think it is worth it to use Disavow tool for all of these bad link or not? uuuLt
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm1 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Update: Copied Website
So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host. So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings? Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose. Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me. Brant
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCB11210 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Getting Back Links When I Cannot Add Outbound Links to My Site
I have a collection of websites that I do not control in terms of content or page creation/editing. As a result, I have no way to add links to outside sites on any existing or new pages. Given this, how can I go about finding and requesting other sites link back to our sites/pages if I cannot offer them a link to their site in return? I know that content is a link driver, but I do not control the content, so I cannot develop new content to help drive links. I appreciate any help/advice any experts can provide.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Are these links bad for my results?
In the past we have requested links on multiple directories. Since we have seen a mayor drop (60% in traffic) in results around the pinquin update 24-26th of April. Our results have been slowly getting lower and lower in Google. Is it possible to tell if these links are in fact doing my site harm? Before the 26th of April it was easy to see that the results where benefiting from the submission to those directories. We did not have any messages in webmaster tools and reconsideration says "no manual spam action taken". What would be the best strategy to turn this around and go up again? A selection of the requested links can be found below. <colgroup><col width="266"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2Hillz
| www.thesquat.org |
| www.directmylink.com |
| www.thegreatdirectory.org |
| www.submission4u.com |
| www.urlmoz.com |
| www.basoti.org |
| www.iwebdirectory.co.uk |
| www.freeinternetwebdirectory.com |
| addsite-submitfree.com |
| opendirectorys.com |
| www.xennobb.com |
| mdwerks.com |
| www.directoryfire.com |
| www.rssbuffet.com | To give a good view on the problem: The requested links anchors are mostly not in the native language of the directories. Thanks!0