Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?

[jab1000]

Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them.  Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain.  Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy?  Here is the breakdown of sites:

Site1:  Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products

Site2:  Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month

Site3:  Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month

The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days.  Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching.  Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day.  Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead.

Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category).  We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page.

FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there.  Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related.

Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience.  Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them.

We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now?

How to fix it and make the Penguin happy?  Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it:

1.  Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd.

2.  Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links".  This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page.

3.  On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals.  Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall.

Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there.  Still thinking #2 above could be better?

Any other thoughts would be great!

Thanks,

Jeremy

[Thos003]

If you are saying you have 75k links from your domains cross linking then I would agree. Product websites have been under attack for awhile now.Tough one.

[jab1000]

Thomas,

Thanks for your thoughts and good questions...

All 3 of the websites are hosted on different dedicated Amazon AWS instances - each having their own independent IP addresses.  Yeah it is possible google could be picking up something here, but not sure.

Content is decent overall -- it does need more though and with that many products, some of the content is the "default" manufacturer text so we will need to beef it up as well and make it more unique text. As for product uniqueness, all the tennis online retailers sell the same products so the key will be unique text since the names/prices are all set from the manufacturers.

All of our product URLs are "search engine safe" urls with the following methodology -> /product/[mfg-name]/[product-name]/  I am thinking we are pretty good with the URLs.

Unfortunately I think Google is making products harder now since there normally isn't lots of "content" on a Wilson ProStaff Six.One Tennis Racquet.  My guess is this is also why they are charging for google merchant as well.

I am still thinking we should drop down the "total links" (followed links) in our "linking" since right now with the different product links from Site2 and Site3 the count is about 75k.  Plus also work on more unique content online as well.

[Thos003]

In my opinion, linking from sister sites can be done if the links are useful. Seomoz.org links to Mozcast.com. I link from my offsite blog to my main site. I believe that when the link is relevant then you can link it over. If the links are footer or done by a program that links all "key-word" mentions to the other site then it looks bad. The best place for links is in the content and where it is relevant. Diversify the anchor text. Make it more natural. Your hosting on these sites could also be affecting your linking. Are all the links from the same IP address? Are all of links coming form within your 3 sites?

There are many other reasons your rank could be dropping. Duplicate content, thin content, bad links.. For most product websites it seems that the product description is either too thin, or duplicate from all the other product descriptions for that item online. How unique is your product content?

When ever I approach a poor performing website, I try to evaluate all the onsite elements first. After I've fixed all of the onsite elements then I will look at linking problems.