Linking to the same sites from more than one of my sites, is this bad?

[fersu]

If I work for a company that has more than one website within the same industry and we have separate websites within that industry.  An example would be:

CarLoans.com   HomeLoans.com & PersonalLoans.com

The only difference from this example is that we are a B2B Company.

My question is: is it bad to acquire links from the same external websites for multiple websites that we own and want to rank for?

If I establish a relationship with Forbes or some other website and I can get links to several of our sites, will it ever be bad to link to all of our websites from this one website.  I am asking not just for high domain authority website like Forbes, but also for websites that may have a DA in the 30's 40's and 50's as well.

Thank you

[RobCairns]

The above advice is good, but also check the hosting situation for each of your sites. Anything but Class A hosting will leave a footprint which can be traced back to each of your sites - this is why PBN's are really getting crunched now.

It probably won't hurt you if you do it a couple times for each of your websites from a single source. After all, that is pretty common. However, if you are planning on repeating this strategy from multiple link sources for all 3 of your sites, this is a very noticeable PBN linking strategy and has been under fire for the last couple of years.

The only way to avoid this is to ensure your sites are hosted on separate servers (Class A hosting). This will eliminate most issues related to "paid" links, PBN's and the like. It isn't a guaranteed fix, but it's your best bet if you haven't taken other precautions and plan on using this kind of strategy on a large scale.

After that it's just a matter of making sure your websites are relevant to the pages linking to you, and your content is worth reading. Follow the above suggestions (no over-optimization, etc.) and you should be fine.

[fersu]

I do not want to link to all of our sites from every domain I make a relationship with. I am wondering if I guest post on one website every 2 months for 6 months (3 links from one site pointed towards 3 of my sites) will it look unnatural?  Will it look unnatural if I do this on 5 websites while I also acquire other natural links that are specific to each individual site.  I do everything I can not to over-optimize it.

[BrianJGomez]

Assuming there's a logical business reason to link them I would do it but I would take the following precautions:

1. Don't over optimize the anchor text. Use branded anchor text or something like that.

2. Make sure each property has a distinctly different link profile. In other words getting a Forbes link to each of the properties doesn't make much sense and it definitely doesn't signal natural link acquisition to Google.

3. Monitor the rankings and GWT metrics for the properties for the first few months after linking them and see if you see any noticeable decline in traffic or rankings. If so, I would take the links down.

[guidetoiceland]

Guess not, as long as the links do not have over-optimized anchor text and do not come from sites with high spam score. Also of course as long ad they´re not paid links.