Should I remove backlink from templated page?

[McCaldin]

Hi,

I manage 2 websites; website A and website B.  Both websites are hosted on the same webserver.

Website A is significantly more established than Website B with a better domain authority and much netter keyword rankings.  I have a backlink from website A to Website B.  The link is do-follow and is in a sidebar template that appears on just about every page of website A.  Also, this template is used in nearly all of the subdomains of website A for a total of 1,362 pages.

It occurs to me that Google might see this as unnatural.

I am considering removing this link from the template and adding it to the content of the landing page so that we have only one link from Website A to Website B.

It seems rational to me but I'd like a second opinion, please.

Thanks in advance.

[McCaldin]

Hi,

I like that.  I think that I'll adapt it to insert a nofollow rel into the link in question on pages other than Site A's Homepage.

Thank you for your help.

[McCaldin]

Hi,

Both sites belong to the same company.  Site A sells villas in Ireland and Site B sells luxury villas worldwide.  There are no keywords in the links. The keyword rankings for Site B got hammered after Penguin 3.0, you can almost hear them whistling as they plummet into oblivion. I'm looking for cause.  I will nofollow the link except for the one on the homepage only.

Thanks you for your help and advice.

[DennisSeymour]

I have a different opinion for this.

It's just one domain for me and it's not a million pages. Both are yours. Just leave the link alone. Either way, you can always remove it anytime.

If I'm really bothered, I would just make it a link on one page of that domain.

It's like all those sites having blogrolls, nothing really happened to them. You can look around other blogs, SEO guys, accountant, mommy bloggers, etc. They do that all the time.

That is, unless they were multiple artificial blogs from their own private networks specifically to boost their SEO/game google.

[Shakur]

Hey,

I used to have the same problem with some backlinks til i´ve found this script that helps me not to replicate the url from my backlink to all the pages around the site.

Example Page

If you want to try it. Hope it helps you.

Regards

[AlanBleiweiss]

What is the relationship between site A and site B? Is it a "legitimate" "owned by or managed by the same company" relationship that would exist even if SEO didn't exist?

If so, it is valid to link from one site to another. If not, those links become more questionable as to "why are these here?" understanding.

Even if there is a legitimate reason outside of SEO, what is the overall signal? If they're keyword based links and not just using anchor text that shows the name of the destination site, they're more vulnerable to suspicion.

Even in those situations where there is a legitimate "we're just providing links to another property we own" links, and they're not using keyword anchor text, there is still some "slight" vulnerability, however it's minor compared to keyword anchors or "not here for reasons outside SEO" issues. Because of that, the best practice is to nofollow them just to be "safe" in the age of Penguin and manual reviewers who might mistake a legitimate linking reason for an attempt to over-optimize inbound links.