Should You Be Linking Your Own Sites As Part Of Your Link Building Strategy?
There seems to be several different views as to whether or not you should build separate sites and link them together as part of a link building program. In the long run there is really only one answer – no!
Having said that, I will now proceed to contradict myself to some extent. If you have a website that promotes several different products or services then having separate websites or blogs to promote each product/service could be a practical way to go. It is only natural then that these sites will link back to the parent site. The question then is whether or not you gain any real value from these links.
There are several ways to look at these links and without a definitive response from the search engines, most of it is guess work. In a practical sense, if the search engine knows the sites are related then they will most likely treat the links as internal links. There is nothing wrong with that since internal links can be an important part of your strategy.
The second approach is to assume that search engines like Google know the sites are related and pass no link value between them at all – not even internal links. The final approach is to think you can fool the search engines and hope to receive a boost in links. Search engines have become pretty smart so your chances of fooling them are fairly remote.
If you take either of the first two theories into consideration then it becomes obvious that linking related sites may help your link building strategies although only marginally. The process certainly shouldn’t draw any penalties.
The proviso to all of this will always come back to the one approach championed by Google – is it in the best interests of the user. Unrelated sites that link together cannot really be seen as being in the best interests of the user. You can have navigational links to your own sites, that can be seen as natural. However links to unrelated sites within your content could be seen as spamming.
Links built within content to related pages on another site is in the best interest of your user and that needs to be your approach. The link value built? That is probably marginal and let’s face it, these days you need link numbers in the high hundreds or perhaps even thousands to be competitive in the search engines. You will never achieve this by linking your own sites and there will not be the diversity of links that search engines like Google require.
Using your own sites as part of a link building strategy is never going to be effective to build link numbers. If you use them to assist your visitors you may find a spin off effect. If search engines like Google notice users clicking through on a regular basis then the linked page will increase in authority value – just one of the components used to rank pages. In that situation – a linked site is well worth the effort – so long as users follow the link trail.
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