Can I set up different domains that inter-link without being penalized?
August 6, 2010 3:10 PM
Will setting up multiple sites and pages that inter-link be penalized by Google?
I have four domains right now. Let's call them brazil.us, brazil.me, brazil.biz, and brazil.ch. My name is "Brazil" just like the country*.
I bought the rights to these so that I could stack them. I thought that brazil.us could be the umbrella site with links for both my business and personal pages. When you go to the .us site, you would then be given links to the .me site (personal ramblings, blogs, etc), the .biz site (businesses I run) or the .ch site (for business I am gearing up to do in Switzerland). Each may well then have a handful of subsites.
The point is that I want someone to be able to explore everything easily without having my personal blog on my business site in any way directly.
I have found these links on ask:
http://ask.metafilter.com/40408/And-many-shall-be-one
http://ask.metafilter.com/155268/I-want-to-learn-about-marketing-on-the-web-the-right-way
http://ask.metafilter.com/127522/Does-listing-every-single-location-you-service-help-your-PageRank
But they don't get me where I need to be.
Will Google penalize me for this? It seems like the answer would be "no", but having read some of the others, I am afraid I don't understand.
Right now I am slowly developing my sites and would like to not be blacklisted right off the bat.
The sites would be projects, articles, press, etc. NOT spam or other linkfarmage weirdness, but will Google be able to tell?
I already know about Google's webmaster tools and am starting to get a feel for them, but some things are unclear.
Links to terms or articles as well as your personal experiences/advice would be welcome.
*My name isn't Brazil, but all of my business stuff is my name. My personal and business lives are almost impossible to separate right now, but the format is the same as my setup (geographic entity=my name), and I don't want to have a hint of: "LQQK at ME! View my sites!" on here, hence the anonymity.
I have four domains right now. Let's call them brazil.us, brazil.me, brazil.biz, and brazil.ch. My name is "Brazil" just like the country*.
I bought the rights to these so that I could stack them. I thought that brazil.us could be the umbrella site with links for both my business and personal pages. When you go to the .us site, you would then be given links to the .me site (personal ramblings, blogs, etc), the .biz site (businesses I run) or the .ch site (for business I am gearing up to do in Switzerland). Each may well then have a handful of subsites.
The point is that I want someone to be able to explore everything easily without having my personal blog on my business site in any way directly.
I have found these links on ask:
http://ask.metafilter.com/40408/And-many-shall-be-one
http://ask.metafilter.com/155268/I-want-to-learn-about-marketing-on-the-web-the-right-way
http://ask.metafilter.com/127522/Does-listing-every-single-location-you-service-help-your-PageRank
But they don't get me where I need to be.
Will Google penalize me for this? It seems like the answer would be "no", but having read some of the others, I am afraid I don't understand.
Right now I am slowly developing my sites and would like to not be blacklisted right off the bat.
The sites would be projects, articles, press, etc. NOT spam or other linkfarmage weirdness, but will Google be able to tell?
I already know about Google's webmaster tools and am starting to get a feel for them, but some things are unclear.
Links to terms or articles as well as your personal experiences/advice would be welcome.
*My name isn't Brazil, but all of my business stuff is my name. My personal and business lives are almost impossible to separate right now, but the format is the same as my setup (geographic entity=my name), and I don't want to have a hint of: "LQQK at ME! View my sites!" on here, hence the anonymity.
Yeah, people usually have one site they allow spiders, and which links out to other lang sites, and you can certainly skip the links and do a lookup on the client IP and redirect them automatically. CNN uses a little bar at the top that says "You are reading the X edition of the site, would you like to make this permanent?"
posted by rhizome at 6:46 PM on August 6, 2010
posted by rhizome at 6:46 PM on August 6, 2010
Google can tell you're legit. More to the point, Google is really good at telling when a site is NOT legit.
The big red flag in a situation like this is when you have identical content (I mean IDENTICAL) on all of the sites, AND they're interlinked. So far as I know, you should be fine with the set-up you describe.
posted by ErikaB at 7:13 PM on August 6, 2010
The big red flag in a situation like this is when you have identical content (I mean IDENTICAL) on all of the sites, AND they're interlinked. So far as I know, you should be fine with the set-up you describe.
posted by ErikaB at 7:13 PM on August 6, 2010
Credentials: I work at an online search advertising agency. While I manage paid search business, I know plenty about SEO.
If your sites are not scammy and are interlinking with good intent (ie. you're not just trying to build a link farm), you shouldn't have any issues. In fact, if they are setup on different servers that are located in different geographic regions (ie. different IP blocks), this can actually be beneficial to wherever you are directing your link juice.
You can direct it easily by linking to one or two sites, and having those sites not link out to the others, or doing so with no-follow links.
posted by Elminster24 at 6:51 AM on August 7, 2010
If your sites are not scammy and are interlinking with good intent (ie. you're not just trying to build a link farm), you shouldn't have any issues. In fact, if they are setup on different servers that are located in different geographic regions (ie. different IP blocks), this can actually be beneficial to wherever you are directing your link juice.
You can direct it easily by linking to one or two sites, and having those sites not link out to the others, or doing so with no-follow links.
posted by Elminster24 at 6:51 AM on August 7, 2010
I have no problem with having a set of interlinked personal/professional/family sites, but as others have mentioned if the sites were all identical, or if they consisted of nothing but links, then you would most likely fall foul of the spam detection algorithms.
Also, no-one else seems to have mentioned here, sign up all your sites for Google Webmaster Tools so that, if you do happen to trigger the spam detectors for some reason, you'll find out when and why.
posted by robertc at 4:28 PM on August 9, 2010
Also, no-one else seems to have mentioned here, sign up all your sites for Google Webmaster Tools so that, if you do happen to trigger the spam detectors for some reason, you'll find out when and why.
posted by robertc at 4:28 PM on August 9, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
If you're worried about it, though, you can disallow google bots for .me, .biz, and .ch so only the .us gets indexed; that'll also make it so people googling you will always get your umbrella site.
posted by wayland at 6:16 PM on August 6, 2010