How to cross-link a network of dozen hotel booking sites
-
Hi, I have about a dozen hotel booking sites in different cities. All content is unique on each site and specific to its city. Is it a good idea to cross-link them all? If so, is there any strategy to follow? Some of them are older and well established sites wheres others were created recently. The goal is to improve rankings of the newer sites. I appreciate any advice. Thanks!
-
Hi Vitaly
A good question. There are usually 2 main considerations when it comes to cross-linking sites:
-
To benefit the visitor from pointing to a useful related site
-
To try and aid SEO/Search efforts.
Your goal of trying to improve rankings of the newer sites by linking your hotel booking sites together could be counter-productive. Cross-linking sites with the intention of trying to improve search rankings (through the passing of link juice through the said links) usually has a short-term gain, then either neutral or negative. It's a risky game in trying to 'manipulate' search rankings by linking a load of sites together, which being honest is just what this would be.
With regards to the other reason for doing so, providing links that visitors could find useful, that's a sound and credible reason to link the sites together, just play it safe and NoFollow the links as Ben suggests. This would be playing it by the rules and keep the search engines happy whilst also benefiting your visitors.
Have you considered migrating your websites into one large site to serve all cities? Done properly, always with the visitor experience & offering in mind, it can benefit everyone. You'd only have the one website to create content for and get links into, whilst providing one more in-depth offering and experience to your visitors. Worth considering anyway, local search can still be catered for with one large website.
Kind regards
Simon
-
-
To be honest I wouldn't until the newer sites mature a bit. But if you were to go forward with it, I would recommend you no-follow the links.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Recovering from spam links on MY site
Hey guys, Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites. Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed. Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods? Thanks so much for any thoughts, Yon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yon230 -
Is my site being penalized?
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+). All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it. There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
Any success stories after removing excessive cross domain linking?
Hi, I found some excessive cross domain linking from a separate blog to the main company website. It sounds like best practice is to cut back on this, but I don't have any proof of this. I'm cautious about cutting off existing links; we removed two redundant domains that had a huge number of links pointing to the main site almost 1 year ago, but didn't see any correlated improvement in rankings or traffic per se. Hoping some people can share a success story after pruning off excessive cross linking either for their own website or for a client's. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Hello everyone, I just ask one question: How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | backlinkmag0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?
Law firm has a main brand site (lawfirmname.com) with lots of content focusing on personal injury related areas of law. They also do other unrelated areas of law such as bankruptcy and divorce. They have a separate website for bankruptcy and a separate one for divorce. These websites have good quality content, a backlinking campaign, and are fairly large websites, with landing pages for different cities. They also have created local microsites in the areas of bankruptcy and divorce that target specific smaller cities that the main bankruptcy site and divorce site do not target well. These microsites have a good deal of original content and the content is mostly specific to the city the website is about, and virtually no backlinks. There are about 15 microsites for cities in bankruptcy and 10 in divorce and they rank pretty well for these city specific local searches. None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account). Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how? I considered making a simple and general page on the lawfirmname.com personal injury site for bankruptcy and divorce (lawfirmname.com/bankruptcy and lawfirmname.com/divorce) and then saying on the page something to the effect of "for more information on bankruptcy go to our main bankruptcy site at ....." and putting the link to the main bankruptcy site. Same for divorce. This way users can go to lawfirmname.com site and find Other Practice Areas, go to bankruptcy page, and link to main bankruptcy site. Is this the best way to link to these two main sites for bankruptcy and divorce or should I be linking upward? Secondly, should I link the city specific microsites to any of the other sites or leave them completely separate? Thirdly, should all of these sites be hosted on the same account or is this something that should be changed? I was considering not linking the city specific sites at all, but if I did this I didn't know if I should create different hosting accounts for them (which could be expensive). The sites work well in themselves without being linked, but wanted to try to network them in some way if possible without getting penalized or causing any issues with the search engines. Any help would be appreciated on how to network and host all of these websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | broca777110 -
Purchased new site with good SERP ranks, do I operate and build links or redirect the TLD?
I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain. Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickEubanks0 -
How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized
I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com). Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance). My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either. Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this? Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0