How Effective Are Links Between The Same Company's Websites With Different Domain Extensions?

[PeaSoupDigital]

Morning!

The main competitor of an eCommerce site I'm working on has a total of 31 sites for 31 different countries. Each one of these sites has a different domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .it etc.), and every single one of these sites' pages links to all the other homepages through a dropdown menu on the navigation bar.

When I pop the .co.uk URL (our main competitor) into Open Site Explorer, I'm advised they have a 45,079 links from 475 domains. If I look at 'just discovered' links, most are from their own sites - I guess MOZ picks these up every time a new page is created.

Now, these guys are huge in the UK. They rank in the top 10 for pretty much every single search term and, to put it into some kind of perspective, their Search Metrics score is 33,000 compared to our measly 160!

Don't get me wrong, they do get some decent links from authoritative sites, but it seem most of their links are from their own sites. How does Google view these? Does my competitor have these thousands of 'internal' backlinks to thank for their current position?

I've just checked their .kr URL and this has 12.5 million(!) links from just 450 domains. Do every single one of these links pass equity? Or does Google just look at one from each domain?

Thanks,

Lewis

[MonicaOConnor]

Theoretically this is not a good strategy because the value of these links are minimal compared to links to domains hosted on other servers in different places. There is no technical penalty for this unless you are over abusing the quantity of links, but, the value of the links is extremely low.

[SID560]

Hello.  One of my competitors does the same thing.  Not different domain extentions like yours but just .com but a domain for each of their representatives that the navigational bar points to their main site.  The registeration shows they own all these 100 sites but their main sites gets all the backlinks.  So yes it works for them.