License Details across multiple regional brand sites

[RedSearch01]

Hi guys!

I have a quick question.  Our team are currently having a debate regarding whether we should display our licensing details as text across all our brands in multiple regions (roughly 50 sites). My argument is that if you are required to have a license to be able to operate legally that Google would EXPECT to be able to crawl those details in order to provide their (Google) users with reliable results as opposed to rogue operators.

The other side of the argument is that it will tie all the sites together and that would be a huge risk (as Google will perceive it as a network)- also that it would be seen as duplicate content?

Would really appreciate any feedback on what is the best to do in this case.

Thanks!!

[RedSearch01]

Thanks Monica and Jarno, appreciate you taking the time to give your opinions.

Completely agree with what you have said. There are obviously many multinational businesses so I cant see why Google will have an issue with having multiple sites (even pointing at each other) as long as it provides value, firstly to the visitor in terms of trust and also as a trust signal to Google (assisting them provide more reliable results.) In my mind the advantages far out-way the "potential risk". On the flip side doing it to manipulate ranking, purely to pass link juice or replicating and re-purposing content across multiple sites could have a negative impact but I don think that applies in this case.

Will do some more research and see whether webmaster support has posts on dealing with multinational brand sites.

Thanks again!

[MonicaOConnor]

I agree with Jarno. I don't think there is a great risk of being seen as a network. It is important that you have the information displayed somewhere, whether you put an image in your footer, or add the data to your contact us page, that would be your preference. I don't think it will hurt to have it on other sites.

[JarnoNijzing]

Wayne,

What if you would make a section on your main website for licenses and there each license that you have given to a company gets it's own page. On that page their company information is shown with adress, phonenumbers etc.

They put up a shield or badge, that you have to develop, with a link to their section/license on your site. That way you do the licensing and resolve the issue of duplicate content since the information is gathered on your site. And you get about 50+ incoming links. About the link network I'm not all that concerned. I run a website with over 900 campsites. I guess about 200 of those sites link to our website and we link to their website on their own page. We never had any problems with that method.

Hope you understand what I'm getting at.

regards

Jarno