SEO Tycoon

**scorpioserve** · 05-24-2011, 03:48 PM

I have 20 sites that all offer accommodation, each of these websites have been independantly running, some for 12 years, some for only 3 years, they are all owned by one holding company.
They are all in different locations around a particular country, each site is about 20-30 pages in size and about 5 of them have blogs that have up to 3000 pages worth of content spanning the past 6 years or so.
I would like to know the best link strategy for linking all these sites together, some are PR5, PR4, PR3, and PR2 for one of them.
They have all had their own SEO done on them previously.

Can I just add 19 links on site A pointing to the other sites, then 19 links on site B, etc, etc,
Will this help at all, right now none of the sites link to one another.

Please help.

**edgray** · 05-24-2011, 04:26 PM

Interesting issue. Just thinking aloud:

In theory, you have nothing to lose by just linking to the other 19 sites from each individual site. The PR from the page with the links will be split between the other sites, and I guess be reciprocated from the links back to it.

However, you've pretty much just described a link farm. Now I'm assuming that you're sites are legit, but even so, if you Google decides to penalise you, it could take a while to get that kind of thing sorted out. In theory, as PR gets passed around your site, because they're all linking to each other, even with the PR decay your pages might all make a significant jump in PR, which could ring alarm bells.

Perhaps you could take a different tack with this? Have you thought about making a single page that links to the 20 sites, keeping them from linking to each other? Again, Google might consider this page junk, and that could potentially damage your other sites if you get considered to be in a bad neighbourhood.

At the end of the day, if the links are good for your end user, and not simply there to try and sculpt PR or something, Google shouldn't worry about you. But maybe what you could do is use the nofollow attribute, and then you most likely won't have any issue whatsoever.

Chris, your thoughts?

**scorpioserve** · 05-24-2011, 05:37 PM

Hi edgray, thanks for your comments on this issue.

Just to answer a question or 2
Yes the sites are certainly legit, and full of good quality unique content.
The reason I would like to link them all together is certainly for higher search engine
rankings.

My client has spent millions purchasing land all over the place and building accommodation, resorts etc on the land, his search engine rankings are not great at all, and he only gets about 5000 visitors a month to his best positioned website.

I have just taken over. This was the problem, he had 20 websites produced by 20 different web developers, some good, some alright and some terrible.
His first development was about 13 years ago and the site was developed at that stage, now as time went by, lets say 3 years later, that site was redone by another developer, and they just did whatever they liked, and 3 years later another developer.
Lets say that 1 site has been redone now 5 times in the last 13 years, there is a page of the site for lets say the restaurant.
The first developer made that page www.example.com/restaurant.htm, the next developer called it www.example.com/the-restaurant.html, the third did www.example.com/our-meals.html, the fourth did www.example.com/index.php?navigation=7&id=2, and the fifth has done www.example.com/restaurant some were htm, some were html, some had the non www version redirecting to the www version and some did not.

You see the mess, nobody by the looks of things did any redirection so google just recrawled the site each time and the previous PR for that page was just lost.
At this stage the only page that has any amount of good PR for almost all 20 sites is the home page of each, because they could not mess that up too much, it had to be www.example.com. Although some developers did not use canonical link tags and therefore www.example.com and www.example.com/index.php were seen as 2 different pages, and they were seen as a duplicate by Google.
Also the last developer got a hold of 2 of the sites both with 7 year old domain names, and changed them for some unknown reason.

Now I do not really feature in Google at all, so I have to start again basically, find all the old links and fix them, add redirects all over place etc.

So yes I am looking for any way to climb the Google ladder a little faster but only using white hat seo, it seems fair that I should be able to link these all together like this as they are all owned by the same group but all different geographic locations within 2 different countries.

**chrishirst** · 05-24-2011, 05:56 PM

Link them where it makes sense to REAL USERS for them to be linked and link the PAGES not JUST the "home" page.

Treat the group of sites as if it were a single site and link between the pages naturally.

Forget about trivialities such as SGB PR and treat the whole thing as if search engines did NOT exist.

**mpw45233** · 05-24-2011, 08:30 PM

If they're hosted from the same ip address, then I can gaurantee you it will have no seo benefit. (I've tried it) Even if they're not (and I haven't tried this), I don't think reciprocal links have much value. Maybe a tiny bit, but it's clear to the SE's that it's a link exchange.

If you were Google, would you give points for these?

**scorpioserve** · 05-25-2011, 02:30 AM

mpw45233: Luckily they are hosted from all over the place so they all have different ip addresses from different locations.

chrishirst: I understand what you are saying, but would like to clarify something even though you said pretend search engines do NOT exist, if I put a link on a PR5 homepage that Google has been aware of that page and that domain for many years, I would assume that link would be worthwhile, however if I insert the same link on a brand new page called links, and the site has never had a page called links, therefore it is new and PR0, surely that link would not do much.

**mpw45233** · 05-25-2011, 03:03 AM

I was just trying to help dude...................That's all........

**scorpioserve** · 05-25-2011, 04:24 AM

mpw45233: Hi Michael sorry I was not trying to by funny with my reply, I appreciate your advice, I promise that the sentence I wrote you was not intended to upset you at all.

I am re-reading it now and can not see how you could of misconstrued this message as anything sarcastic or odd, I was just stating that although I was appreciative of your reply, I could confirm that in this particular case that was not an issue.

I am honestly sorry if you felt my reply was insensitive.

**edgray** · 05-25-2011, 04:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Treat the group of sites as if it were a single site and link between the pages naturally.

probably the best advice you'll get on this subject

**scorpioserve** · 05-25-2011, 05:30 AM

Thanks to everyone for all the advice I will try and make it as natural as possible, thanks.

**edgray** · 05-25-2011, 05:31 AM

excellent and good luck! We'd love to hear how it goes

**scorpioserve** · 05-25-2011, 05:33 AM

I will write a report when done and try to let you all know what happens. I think it would make for an interesting few weeks I have ahead of me.

**chrishirst** · 05-26-2011, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mpw45233

If they're hosted from the same ip address, then I can gaurantee you it will have no seo benefit. (I've tried it) Even if they're not (and I haven't tried this), I don't think reciprocal links have much value. Maybe a tiny bit, but it's clear to the SE's that it's a link exchange.

If you were Google, would you give points for these?

Doesn't seem to affect pages hosted Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Squidoo, Hubpages etc etc.

Most of the sites we host on one server, link back and forth to each other from a single IP because they are artists, artist management and promotion agencies.

No one has ever been affected by such unthinking behaviour in well over ten years of hosting them.

**chrishirst** · 05-26-2011, 08:57 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpJacspWz4Y

**scorpioserve** · 05-26-2011, 02:44 PM

Thanks Chrishirst excellent answer.

**mpw45233** · 12:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Doesn't seem to affect pages hosted Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Squidoo, Hubpages etc etc.

Most of the sites we host on one server, link back and forth to each other from a single IP because they are artists, artist management and promotion agencies.

No one has ever been affected by such unthinking behaviour in well over ten years of hosting them.

I didn't say it affected them, I said it didn't have any SEO benefit. I'm sure there are other people that have 10 or more websites to experiment with and linked them together. I'd like to know what their experiences where, they may be different form mine.

But I doubt it. I would really like to hear about this btw.

And Scorpioserve, I didn't take any offense, I guess it just came out wrong.

**chrishirst** · 05-27-2011, 07:30 AM

Quote:

I didn't say it affected them, I said it didn't have any SEO benefit.

Links are NOT optimising. Links are PROMOTION (on two counts) and marketing.

**Jimbob1208** · 06-13-2011, 08:30 AM

Just link naturally. If content on one site makes reference to content that is on another site then drop a link in to it. Google expects links to be sign posts to relevant content and that is related to what the visitor is reading or looking for.