In a recent John Mueller hangout, an SEO professional asked about footer links on multiple sites.
They have several sites from the same owner. These sites discuss different topics, but all fall under the same banner of gaming.
So basically, these sites all talk about different aspects of gaming, and the SEO professional wants to link between these sites in the footer.
They were also concerned about whether this tactic violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
John Mueller explained that so long as you don’t have 500 sites that you’re doing this with, you should be fine.
He recommends that you keep the sites to a reasonable number, say between 5 and 10.
He also said that it’s possible that if you take several sites and shrink them down into one site, you could become a very strong competitor in that industry.
This method is better overall, rather than creating multiple sites that all link to one another, because you’re maximizing the strength of one site.
This happens at approximately the 41:40 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
I have a few sites from the same owner that talk about different aspects of the, the same topic overall, let’s say gaming, for instance, and different sites targeting different parts of gaming or different games. Would it be considered against the guidelines, if the footer of each site of one links to the others?
John (Answer) 42:01
So from from our point of view, as long as these are significantly different sites, that’s perfectly fine. As long as you have a reasonable number of sites, then I don’t see a problem with that. By reasonable number of sites, I’m saying like, I don’t know, maybe like one or two handful of sites that you link like this.
If you have something like hundreds of sites that you’re linking like this, then to me, that starts looking a lot like doorway pages, doorway sites. And that would be something I would avoid.
But from a technical point of view, you could do something like this, like linking between the different versions of, or the different sites that you have, if it’s something I don’t know, along the lines of, like 5 or 10 sites, maybe maximum. From a practical SEO point of view, I don’t know if you actually get an advantage out of splitting things up into separate sites like this.
Sometimes having one really strong website is a lot more value than having multiple sites that are kind of like lower value.
In particular, if you’re active in a very competitive area, and you take your pretty competitive site, and you split it up into 10 different versions, then it can be that those 10 different versions are individually kind of seen as being less strong.
And then in that one very competitive area where you’re active in, and suddenly you have 10 sites that are seen as a little bit less strong, which can’t compete at all with the first page search results. So that’s something also to try to keep in mind in that, like, just because you can split things up into separate sites, sometimes it doesn’t really make sense to do though.
And I’m a big fan of having fewer sites, not having more sites.
On the one hand, it’s easier to maintain. But on the other hand, you can make those sites a lot stronger, too.
