Do you think it's a good idea to try to find synergy between clients for blog posts/citations/links, or should you keep clients away from each other?

[PathMarketing]

Say you have for example three (in this case) clients, and:

• Client A sells red widgets
• Client B is a doctor
• Client C sellls blue widgets

With some research, you find that:

• Red widgets (A) can make the process of blue widget creation (C) even more effective.
• Red widgets (A) can protect you from harmful things that doctors (B) are qualified to recommend that you stay away from.
• Furthermore, there are things that doctors (B) recommend that you do in order to maximize the benefits of red widgets (A)
• Blue widgets (C) carry with them certain potential health risks, which according to doctors (B) can be minimized using the following means
• Sometimes blue widgets (C) can be used to effectively repair red widget (A) factories

...and so forth.

Sure you're really writing these articles to generate links and exchange authority, and frankly you started with "how can I find synergy between these clients?" rather than a with a great article subject that needed a citation which luckily happened to be another client, but the citations are legitimate and the clients are qualified to speak on the subjects where their expertise and interests overlap.

Would you consider going ahead with this? Does anyone have any experience doing it? I could see potential pitfalls if clients were to interact with each other, but keeping yourself as the intermediary might well work and overall it seems like a decent way to grab low-hanging fruit as they say. What do you guys think?

[PathMarketing]

Thanks EGOL, Kevin and Alan - that last mention from EGOL is along the lines of what I am worried could happen because of the motivations behind the posts, which is to cite each other.

Their authority on the subjects where they intersect is legitimate - but these articles would be generated because of those intersections. If I didn't have a blue widget client then the red widget client would have little impetus to write a blog post that extols blue widgets. Even though there's nothing in the posts that isn't true and all clients are qualified authorities to be cited as described. It's just that the posts would be written because the SEO guy (me) sat down and said "how can these clients cite each other legitimately?" rather than red widget guy writing an article on blue widgets and then being lucky enough to have someone (me) who can put them in touch with a blue widget company to cite and be cited by.

They're all on different IP's so that should be okay.

I think I'm going to go ahead with this but I'll tread lightly as recommended. Thanks again, thumbs up for all!

[EGOL]

I think that this could balloon into problems if you are not careful.  Google might be able to detect a link network if you have a lot of Doctor articles out there on various sites serving as "mules" that carry optimized links for "red widgets" and "blue widgets".

[kwoolf]

The only issue I see here is that you said "clients." Are these clients of yours all hosted on the same server with the same IP? Google does take this into account, notably to punish server farms and the like. I'm not exactly sure what levels of cross-linking will count for or against you, but I imagine these sites are relatively small with low domain authority so it shouldn't be an issue.

I might consider posting the doctor's articles on reputable medical sites and then link your clients' sites to articles on these bigger sites with higher domain authority. Try to get your wine articles on other wine related sites as well. You can also try using Zemanta to help with getting more people to link to this content.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Where would you see pitfalls?  If you've done good work for multiple clients, and if, as you say, it's all above-board and legitimate opportunities, then I would definitely communicate the possible opportunity to the clients, then let them decide if they want to participate.  If so, there's nothing wrong with this at all.  But only as long as you keep it to legitimate implementation, and make it only one part of a larger effort all around.