International Site Links In Footer

[EwanFisher]

We have several international sites and we have them linked in the footer of our main .com site . Should we add "nofollow" to these links? Our concern is that Google could see these sites as a network?

[AndrewAkesson]

I wouldn't nofollow these links personally, that isn't what the nofollow tag was designed for.

The nofollow tag would stop google from passing link juice through the links, but it wouldn't stop google actually following the links and figuring out the sites are connected.

If you want users to see you have international sites (which makes complete sense), include the links. But, why not make them more prominent with a country selection page similar to ikea.com or apple.com? Don't be afraid of linking together a legitimate network of sites that sit under a single brand.

[DougRoberts]

I agree with Matt here. You've got a legitimate relationship with these sites, and the presence of these links will be a benefit to your visitors who may want to other countries you serve.

You may even find it beneficial to raise the profile of these other sites as showing you have a global presence may increase confidence/trust in your brand. (As with all such things you'd want to do some testing to make sure as it'll depend on your audience).

Be careful creating international gateway pages. Done badly they can lead to all kinds of problems...

[EwanFisher]

On the .com site we have all the links going to the international pages as follow.

On the various international sites we have links in the footer going pointing to the other sites in each country is it also ok to have these as follow?

Or could the interlinking of the sites cause a problem?

Would it be better for us to do what IKEA have done http://www.ikea.com/ and just have one way links coming from the .com to the all the sites and remove the footer links on the other sites which link to each other?

[AndrewAkesson]

I've just taken a look at the optical express site, assuming this is the site you're referring to.

If if it was my client I'd remove the nofollows from the flags in the footer. I don't see any reason why you'd be penalised for linking together a set of multinational domains for a brand, and removing the nofollows will help the link juice flow around the sites.

[EwanFisher]

We did consider scrapping the .com site however it does rank really well for a lot of our key terms especially in the UK. So we really just use this as a landing page which seems to work well for now.

Thanks for the feedback guys its much appreciated

Matthew