Best linking practice for international domains

[tomypro]

SEOMoz team,

I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property.

Let's say you have

• brandname.DE (German site)
• brandname.FR (French site)
• brandname.CO.UK (British site)

Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google.

Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site?

/PP

[MoosaHemani]

I think Google is discouraging site-wide links that are included to manipulate Google SERP results and are not for users... in your case they seems completely fine. I guess adding the link to other websites (for people who use language other than English) without the anchor text but on a flag will be a better idea.

Link on a flag on the header or footer will give your visitor a clear idea of where to go if English is not the language he is looking for and as it will not have any anchor text so it will give no red alert to Google for manipulation!