Links between own sites cause bad pagerank?
-
Many people say PR does not matter, but for me its an indicator that links from a domain with higher PR may rank better.
My client has a about 4 different travel-sites of very different kinds of travelling. His sites are not ranking bad but all sites have just a PR 0-2 although the content is unique. I made the experience that even sites with few content will have at least a PR of 3 after some years with no SEO effort.
One reason is may some part of duplicate content (4 Tours begin in Manaus, so the description for Manaus is on all the 4 Tour pages the same) but another is that the pages have few external links but many of other sites he is owning... like: also check out this -> link to another own site.
Question: If I take all these links away (they even don't cause many referrals at all) - will this have a positive effect on rankings? Means trying to have always more external links from not self owned sites is a good start?
Thanks for sharing your experiences
Holger
-
If the links between each site are relevant, and the content on each of those sites is 100% unique (it sounds like you may need to work on this aspect) a few links between them are probably not causing any harm, and may actually be helping. A lot of businesses have multiple websites that link between each other. The real test is to be honest with yourself when asking the question: Is this link here for the visitors, or for SEO? Without seeing the sites myself, I can't say whether it looks spammy or not.
I hope this calms your fears (the person asking the question only had one less site than your client): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8
-
Hi Holger,
While the merits of PageRank are still somewhat nebulous as new information develops, it is never bad idea to give the benefit of the doubt to links from domains with higher PR. That said, it may be beneficial for your client to generate even more unique content for each of these sites. Having sites with any duplicate content linking to each other is going to appear as link-scheming to some extent with Google. If these links do not cause many referrals, it would be fairly low-risk to try removing these links and rely more on stand-alone content between the sites to generate stronger PR. For example, you mentioned four of the tours begin in the same place; try creating unique content for each page to reflect the diversity of the tours, and offer links to content hosted outside of your client’s ownership. At the very least, this will help diversify content and give ideas for similar practices in the future.
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
-
Relaunching a site that has had thousands of posts linking to the same 20 articles. How to properly setup internal linking?
I'm in the process of relaunching a music news site (www.prefixmag.com) that once did quite well in search (over a million monthly search visits in its prime). The site got crushed by Panda, etc. and we stopped updating it. I'm starting to do more research but one thing that I noticed was we have modules in the right rail (desktop) that are found on all of our article pages that point to the same posts. (Edit: Added attachment. The links in the right rail under Editor Picks, Features, News, Media, etc. are found on every page of the site). In other words, we have thousands of posts that all link to the same 20 or so articles. Should we not do this if we're not trying to emphasize these posts in Google? Assuming this is the case, what is the proper way to do internal linking? Do we simply setup a sitemap and link to it? I'm hoping to have the thousands of articles we've published over the years have a chance to rank in search again. Also, we have a number of posts that are thin in content should those pages not be submitted in the sitemap? Thanks in advance! 2KmX0
Link Building | | leggo0 -
Exchanging Follow/No-Follow Links with Parnter Site
Hi all, Wondering how Google would interpret the exchange of a no-follow link for a follow link between partner websites. I have a potential referral relationship with a business in my niche and we are hoping to cross-market. The goal would be for my link on his page to be a follow link, while the link to his business on my page would be a no-follow. Would my site get the benefit of a natural link in that scenario or would the two essentially 'cancel each other out' regardless of the follow/no-follow nature of the link? Thanks in advance for any help! -Rich
Link Building | | KingAir900 -
Site not responding well to Link Building
I worked on around 15 EMDs and all of them have similar template but different content. They are all two KW EMDs. Now I did KW research and changed Title tags and Did around 10- 15 links for them in and they all reacted very well to link building except one site. I did the link building for this site in 3 batches- 7 links in first 10 days, then another 7 in next 10 days and another 7 links after 7 days. Site's ranking decreased with each link building. Then I removed the low quality links recently. Now What do you guys suggest should I again do link building?? (though everytime I did link building site lost rankings as mentioned earlier) or WHAT IS THE NEXT STRATEGY AFTER REMOVING BAD LINKS? START LINKING AGAIN, WAIT FOR SOMETIME ?
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Are Directory Links a Good Source of Branded Links?
I am trying to increase the number of branded links for a few of my sites since the links are too heavily weighted on anchor text. If so, would you recommend a service like Directory Maximizer?
Link Building | | rise10 -
Adding a link section - good or bad?
Hi all, I am currently thinking about adding a link section to my site. In 2010 I released a new version of the site, where one of the main differences to the old site was that a link section was left out. Now i see in webmaster tools that a lot of old links are still indexed but has a 500 error. My question is: 1. Will my site in general benefit from having a link sections with relevant links for the users - in terms of SEO? 2. Will my site benefit from creating a link section and having all the old link section URLs in google redirected to the new section? Best regards, Rasmus
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs1 -
What is the best way to transfer a sites link juice.
We have been building a new website for one of our clients which he wants it to replace an existing website which will be taken down shortly. The existing site has a reasonable amount of inbound links and we would like to redirect that link juice to the new website, can anyone tell me what the best way to do this would be. Thanks Fraser
Link Building | | fraserhannah0