Hello Kalena
I took your SEO classes at Search Engine College a while back. I’m hoping you might be able to help me with a question that I really don’t know the answer to.
I now work at an advertising agency and we have various clients…some we work on their SEO and some we don’t.
One of our client’s websites [link removed] has their sister companies listed on the bottom of the site with links pointing to each. All the companies are related and interlinked in the same way. They were told by their “SEO” company that having the companies linked is not a good SEO move.
I would think that since these would be quality links that it is good practice to link them.
Can you please weigh in on this?
Thanks
Lena
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Hi Lena
Actually, I can see where their SEO’s concern lies. All of the sister sites are linked together in the footer, in a kind of feedback loop. This can be misinterpreted by Google to be a mini link farm of sorts.
Please read Google’s guidelines about links and you’ll understand what I mean. They particularly highlight this issue:
“Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines… Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites…”
By all means link to the sister sites, but use the *rel: no-follow* tag on those links so that no link value is attributed to them. That should prevent Google from misinterpreting the link intention.
Hope this helps!
Kalena
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