Linking strategy between my own sites

[limens]

Hi,

I have one main site, let's call it  food.com

I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them   mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc

food.com is on its own separate dedicated server

the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator

I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other.

So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains?

What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site?

How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?

[Prime85]

I have a very similar situation to Limens.

Are you guys saying that i should have sites such as:

http://goo.gl/RxU9M & http://goo.gl/AbUKV

redirected (via a 301 redirect ) to my main site which is: http://goo.gl/JgK1e  ?

If the answer is yes, should they be redirected to the home page (http://goo.gl/JgK1e) or to the specific pages they are about such as http://goo.gl/oiEeG & http://goo.gl/7nA9E

Sorry if this got a little confusing.  Thanks in advance for any advice you guys may have...

[Francisco_Meza]

I was going to create a few small sites that were specific to a service. I was too lazy to do multiple sites so I only did one bigger site. Now everytime I make a new page, it starts ranking immediately on the lower part of page one for my targeted keywords. The site built strength overall. I would probably do exactly as EGOL says and redirect everything to one site.

[icecarats]

I agree with EGOL; for a few years it seemed that 'microsites' were the way to go, especially in regards to B2C sales. You would have operations like CSN Stores and Net Shops all with hundreds, if not thousands of bizarrely specific domains (e.g. I believe Net Shops had something like LeatherCounterHeightBarstools.com or the like). But now, they've mostly stopped doing that.

In part, it's because they realized that having an individual brand was far better than hundreds of tiny sub-brands (they became WayFair.com and HayNeedle.com respectively). But it was also because having multiple domains increased the headache of maintenance, introduced duplicate content problems, and simply added costs. And lastly, just as EGOL says, once they 301's all those little domains back to their main one, they got tons of link juice and relevance.

[3States]

Good point EGOL.

[EGOL]

Not an answer to your question... instead saying what i would do if I had a lot of small websites that were variants of a single theme....

I would redirect all ten of the satellite sites to food.com and have a huge kickass site there.

I would do that because all of that content and all of those links likes and tweets happening for a single site would make it very powerful and hard to beat.

You will do more damage with a pump shotgun than ten slingshots.

I would close the hotdog stands.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

I'm not sure if you should worry about interlinking the sites together.  While you might not get extra benefit from them if Google sees that they're all coming from a known network of sites that are interlinked, I would hesitate to believe Google would punish you per se.

For example, Expedia.com has a ton of sites within their company.  So does Amazon.  Do they get punished for interlinking them all?  No.

However, if you're trying to secure extra credit for the links, you might have to get somewhat smart about how you link to each other, but there's plenty of documentation online to explain some of the strategies you can apply to do that.

[3States]

Hi Limens,

Good question. It's not unreasonable to say that this sort of thing happens entirely innocently all the time. For example, I work for a company that has one main site about the company as a whole, and seven other sites to advertise the company's services in different niches like content writing, SEO and web design. So all seven smaller sites will link to the main site and some will link to other small sites.

But when that's all you have, it starts to look suspicious. If your sites all share a Google AdSense account, that's a good way to get caught and penalized by Google. Same thing goes for the IP.

Don't be afraid to interlink the smaller sites to the main cooking site as long as it's natural. In other words, don't get too greedy with anchor text.

As far as interlinking the smaller domains with each other, it's a bit dangerous no matter what you do. Link a few where it makes sense then fill up on good quality links from other unique domains.

Mike