Crosslinking Question - Footer or Header?

[Jantaro]

We own 9 fashion blogs that focus on different niches. We have Your Next Shoes focusing on shoes, Your Next Dress focusing on dresses, Your Next Handbag focusing on handbags, and so on.

Previously we had links in the blog header to the other sister sites. Your Next Shoes had text links to its 8 sister sites, and so on. However, we were told that this could cause a cross-linking penalty, so we removed these links. My understanding now is that the advice we were given is not necessarily correct.

We think it is useful for our visitors to see that we also operate other blogs, so we are thinking of adding back the links - this time to our footer. Basically I am looking for advise on the best way to go about this.

[cbielich]

If you were placing all the same links on all the different domains then I think that would raise a red flag to Google so I would not suggesting doing that.

Figure out how to make sure the links that go to your other sites are relevant. Instead of a site wide link, link on specific pages that closely relate.

[zeepartner]

I basically agree with Cesar's opinion. But if your brands have a close relation to each other I think it's okay to link to those - from header or footer. Header links will look less spammy since they are well visible for users. If your brands have a legit connection to each other there should be no riks - at least that is my experience with well-established brands that belong to the same company.

But linking from related content always has some benefits compared to sitewide linking - at least for seo. If you want to push cross-selling, linking from a header meta navigation makes sense.