Links between own sites cause bad pagerank?

[inlinear]

Many people say PR does not matter, but for me its an indicator that links from a domain with higher PR may rank better.

My client has a about 4 different travel-sites of very different kinds of travelling. His sites are not ranking bad but all sites have just a PR 0-2 although the content is unique. I made the experience that even sites with few content will have at least a PR of 3 after some years with no SEO effort.

One reason is may some part of duplicate content (4 Tours begin in Manaus, so the description for Manaus is on all the 4 Tour pages the same) but another is that the pages have few external links but many of other sites he is owning... like: also check out this -> link to another own site.

Question: If I take all these links away (they even don't cause many referrals at all)  - will this have a positive effect on rankings? Means trying to have always more external links from not self owned sites is a good start?

Thanks for sharing your experiences

Holger

[Everett]

If the links between each site are relevant, and the content on each of those sites is 100% unique (it sounds like you may need to work on this aspect) a few links between them are probably not causing any harm, and may actually be helping. A lot of businesses have multiple websites that link between each other. The real test is to be honest with yourself when asking the question: Is this link here for the visitors, or for SEO? Without seeing the sites myself, I can't say whether it looks spammy or not.

I hope this calms your fears (the person asking the question only had one less site than your client): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

[SEO5Team]

Hi Holger,

While the merits of PageRank are still somewhat nebulous as new information develops, it is never bad idea to give the benefit of the doubt to links from domains with higher PR. That said, it may be beneficial for your client to generate even more unique content for each of these sites. Having sites with any duplicate content linking to each other is going to appear as link-scheming to some extent with Google. If these links do not cause many referrals, it would be fairly low-risk to try removing these links and rely more on stand-alone content between the sites to generate stronger PR. For example, you mentioned four of the tours begin in the same place; try creating unique content for each page to reflect the diversity of the tours, and offer links to content hosted outside of your client’s ownership. At the very least, this will help diversify content and give ideas for similar practices in the future.