Interlinking sites in multiple languages

[rachelmanning888]

I am working on a project where the client has a main .com site and the following additional sites which are all interlinked:

.com site targeting US
.com site targeting China 
.HK site targeting Hong Kong

All sites contain similar information (although the Chinese site is translated). They are not identical copies but being shopping sites, they contain a lot of similar product information.

Webmeup software (now defunct) showed that the inbound links to the main site, from the additional domains are considered risky. Linkrisk shows them as neutral.

The client wants them to be interlinked and would not want to remove the additional domains as they get a good amount of traffic. In addition, the messages and products for each country domain have been tailored to a degree to suit that audience. We can rewrite the content on the other domains, but obviously this is a big job.

Can anyone advise if this would be causing a problem SEO wise and if so, is the best way to resolve it to rewrite the content on the US and Hong Kong sites?

Alternatively would it be better to integrate the whole lot together (they will soon be rebuilding the main site, so it would be an appropriate time to do this).

[rachelmanning888]

Many thanks Andy.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rachel,

This is similar to another question asked just yesterday and the same could apply very well to yourself too.

HREFLANG is used in cases like this where a site could encounter duplication issues through this kind of setup. There are two areas to look at and consider here - this answers your question if you decide to keep all TLD's the same.

**Q: <a name="q16"></a>Can I use “rel alternate hreflang” across domains / across TLDs?
A: **Yes! Keep in mind that this markup is on a per-URL basis, so if there are alternate URLs across those domains, you would need to add the markup for each individual URL.

You can get many questions answered here: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q16

If you decided to pull everyting into just one site, then this would fit what you want to do:

• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

In terms of inter-linking, this seems to be down to the whim of Google, if they wish to see it as problematic or not. If you are concerned about it, leave the links in place and just add the rel=nofollow attribute - this will remove possible issues.

I hope this helps.

-Andy