Damage Control

[cmjolley]

So here's the deal.....I HAVE to link my external website www.ldnwicklesscandles.com....and any shopping/ecommerce sections of it to my company sponsored website:    ukwicklessscents.scentsy.co.uk so all transactions go through that.

Why do a separate website you might ask? ....our company websites are extremely limited in design and content we're allowed to add like blogs, etc, etc and things to add content to help with longtail searches.  So most of us involved with the company do external sites and link to our other sites.

Which means I have link juice spread over the two sites because so much of the site is linking out...which most means I've got to work twice as hard.

Although my hands are really tied with a lot of things with this, I'm wondering if there's anything you might recommend to lessen the damage so to speak....maybe like changing the navigational structure of my external website so I'm only linking out when absolutely necessary?

I've been reading about navigational structure and it mentions the home page should only link out to the most important pages?  Would this work?

Maybe none of this is something I should worry about?  It seems some of the high rank sites for keywords like scentcity.com who are using the left side bar like I have and the main page with lots of links to her company sponsored site seem to rank despite all this??

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. x

[AlanBleiweiss]

The more you can self-contain the links, the better. If "too many" of your links are outward bound, that can become confusing or annoying to site visitors.  That also applies to search engines being able to figure out "what is this site about" and "why are so many links pointing to this other site".

So always be mindful of that, while maintaining the functionality you need.

It's a mess as you well know. Yet keeping the mess to a minimum is vital.

Ultimately, whatever that linking structure, it will come down to how well optimized the external site is.  And the more confused the link structure is, the more other tasks you'll need to do for SEO to compensate and keep the topical focus strong.