How To Safely Interlink Your Own Sites
If you have two sites in a similar niche, should you put links between them?
This is a difficult question. With the popularity of webmasters doing link exchanges to try to boost their ranking in search engines, Google has decided to devalue reciprocal links. So linking two of your own sites together may not help you get better ranking from Google. It is often better to stay with one-way linking from one of sites to another. To get the maximum boost in Google, it is usually better to have links from one of your higher ranking sites to a lower one.
On the other hand, having links between two related sites can help you get traffic directly. People see the link on one site, click it, and discover your other site.
So we have a little dilemma. We can link our sites together with reciprocal links and risk not getting ranked as well as we could in Google, or we can stick with one way links and lose some potential traffic from one site to another. What do we do?
The solution I have come up with is make one of the links a link that will not been seen by search engine spiders. If I have two sites that are related I will still link the higher ranked page to the lower ranked page using a regular link, but I will use a JavaScript link from the lower ranked page to the higher ranked page. If you want to be extra cautious, this link can also be redirected through a page that has a “nofollow” robot meta tag.
Of course, this same strategy will work if you have 3, 4 or even more sites that you want to interlink.
I’d love to hear you thoughts on this linking strategy.
Coincidentally, Eric Giguere also wrote a post about interlinking sites yesterday, but he has a different strategy.
Eric Giguere Said,
August 8, 2006 @ 5:28 pm
Could be iffy in the future as search engines start looking at the JavaScript to see if you’re doing spammy things that the robots normally wouldn’t see…
Toivo Lainevool Said,
August 8, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
You’re right, Eric. That’s why I’m suggesting using redirection through a page that has the nofollow robot meta tag. If they follow that link then they are explicitly breaking the robots protocol, and I don’t think Google would start doing that.
I initially though of just using a rel=’nofollow’ tag on the back links, but thought that it would be too easy for Google robots to see through that.
I don’t think that this is doing anything spammy. I’m going out of my way to make sure that Google doesn’t put any extra value into these links. The links are there for traffic only. This is in line with Matt Cutts suggesting that a rel=’nofollow’ link on paid text ads.
Eric Giguere Said,
August 10, 2006 @ 12:09 am
Yeah, but wouldn’t you worry that because you’re sending the visitor into a “no fly zone” that the Googlebot will assume you’re being spammy? It’s a tricky situation.
meethere Said,
August 24, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
please help me in detail how to hide one link
Thank u in advance..
Annerose Said,
May 18, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.