Linking Websites to each other

[johnnyfox]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently reviewing the SEO for the various websites owned by the company I work for. Its all very new to me so apologies if this has been covered before.

Basically, we have a main company website and lots of small websites for individual products we sell. However, none of these link back to the main site. Many of the smaller sites generate more traffic than the main one so i'd like to change that.

My first act was going to be to add links to the main site on each of the smaller sites, however I've heard that google penalises sites that do this. Is this true? Any adive is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

[johnnyfox]

Any adive is appreciated

Advice would also be good. :s

 

[ishie]

I don't you'll be penalized for doing that. Are your smaller sites relevant to the main site? Google gives importance to link relevancy.

 

[johnnyfox]

Hi Ishie,

The smaller sites are relevant. They're standalone sites for the products we manufacture.

I'm quite new to the company and it looks like they've not really pushed SEO before. I would have thought having your individual product sites linking back to the main one would be common sense but since they hadn't done it, I wondered if maybe there was a good reason not to....

 

[Andrew23]

This will not be a penalty. Google loves "one way" links but "two way" links are not penalized either. It is perfectly legit to have either one way or two way links to one of your sites.

 

[v2Media]

Don't use site-wide footer links to the main site. Instead, add a page of unique content to each of the satellite sites about the main company. Include some links in this content to the main site and choose good keywords as the anchor text. On each site, have site-wide footer links pointing to the new content page about the main company.

 

[zhoom]

In the home page add a link to your main website because the position of the link has an effect to its value as search engine crawl the links on a website.