How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?

[broca77711]

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.

[broca77711]

I completely understand, it looks like I am going to have to merge all the sites into the lawfirmname.com site and just work very hard on building the practice area pages up to rank well.  The transition is what I am concerned about, but I guess I will just try to make it as painless for their rankings as possible, by taking down the microsites slowly as we build up the lawfirmname.com site and definitely not linking any of them together in the meantime, just leave them like they are until I can take them down.  Thanks for your responses.

[RyanKent]

Steven, the first response shared remains the answer to your inquiry. You offered further clarification, and EGOL responded very nicely. The only thing we can do at this point is to continue to repeat ourselves.

With respect to practicing different areas of law, you have a very unique perspective that is not in alignment with the best user experiences or search engine practices.

Take any store...let's use Walmart....they have groceries, clothes, furniture, and tv's and so forth. They also offer a single website, walmart.com.

The law firm is a single business entity. It likely should have a single site.

At this point my impression is you clearly know and understand the advise which has been offered, but you fear the ranking loss. That is understandable. It will take a significant amount of SEO skill and investment to merge the sites without losing rankings.

[broca77711]

To clarify once again, I inherited this and am planning on letting the "hotdog" stand sites expire and placing the landing pages on the main practice area sites.  So, there are only three websites that I am talking about now.  The main lawfirmname.com website (dealing mostly for personal injury and products liability), the bankruptcy site, and the family law/divorce site.  All three sites are not "hotdog" sites and have quality content in their areas of practice.  Again, this is what I inherited.  So, if I just tried to have one website (lawfirmname.com) and I tried to start from scratch by putting a bankruptcy and divorce page/section on it and start link building, etc., I would have a lot of catching up to do to have these pages compete the way the current bankruptcy and divorce sites do right now.

Also, it does seem that with attorney websites if you have a firm with multiple and very different practice areas (such as personal injury and bankruptcy) it can be difficult for a lawfirmname.com website that has a home page and most of the other site heavily devoted to their main practice (personal injury) and then have a page/section in that site devoted to bankruptcy compete with other attorneys in the area that have a lawfirmname.com website and they only do bankruptcy law, nothing else.  A lawfirmname.com that is very concentrated in one area of law only (only one area of specialization) seems to outrank other lawfirmname.com websites that have many different areas of law.

I am asking if having these three sites, with high quality content, and linking them solely for purposes of making it easy for users to navigate from personal injury site to bankruptcy site to divorce site, possibly with just one link on the lawfirmname.com site to divorce site and one link to bankruptcy site, would these two links have to be "nofollow" links or would it be better to not even link the lawfirmname.com site to the two practice area sites at all?  Again, to clarify my earlier question, I am not talking about the microsites anymore, just the three main sites.  I am just trying to figure out the best way to handle these three main sites going forward and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[EGOL]

If you use "nofollow" you might be safe from a link penalty....  But it would not surprise me if these sites had Panda problems because of all of the very similar pages - that could be considered doorway pages on doorway domains - and when you link them together you paint a target on them.

Then there is the low-quality EMD problem.

You seem to be expending a lot of time, thought and money into trying to rank a bunch of hotdog stand websites.  (The links between them are more dangerous than helpful.)   I think that it would just be better to work on producing high quality content on the main site and allow the hotdog stands to expire.

If I was your competitor I would be amused watching you playing around with 28 hotdog stands while I was building quality.

[broca77711]

The goal is to create a landing page for each city on the main bankruptcy and main divorce site and eventually take down the microsites for cities when these pages begin to rank properly (to transition off of these microsites to the main practice area sites).  The main concern I had is linking the mainlawfirm.com website to the practice area specific sites in order to make it easier for users to navigate from the main firm site to these practice area specific sites.  It is just two links (one from lawfirmname.com to main bankruptcy site, and one from lawfirmname.com to divorce site) and didn't know if linking down to these two practice area sites would cause a penalty if done without "nofollow".  I guess I will use the "nofollow" just to be safe.

[RyanKent]

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?

What you are asking about is creating a link network which violates search engine guidelines, and therefore is not advised.

A link is supposed to be an "independent vote" and unbiased in nature. You are simply taking a bunch of sites you own and linking them together. If you sincerely feel it is a benefit to link the sites, use the "nofollow" attribute to avoid a penalty.