Best practice for multiple domain links

[MickEdwards]

A site i'm working on has about 12 language domains - .es, it, .de etc.

On each page of every domain the header has links to every homepage.  At the moment these are all set to no-follow as an initial step to stop potential link profile issues spreading around.

Moving forward i'm not totally sure how to handle these links.  On one side I see and agree that no-follow is not necessary, but do-follow is just filtering out and weakening link juice.  What is the best way to handle this scenario?

[Dave_Schulhof]

If you have a main homepage which acts as the group homepage you could rel canonical the other domains to the one main homepage so google knows which is the main page and which are not.

[MickEdwards]

thanks David.  No there is no group homepage as such - each domain is only different in language so each homepage is the same and important to rank in the relevant Google engine.

The only 'central point' as such is a .com which is a page linking out to each domain.

[Dave_Schulhof]

Hi Michael, this article from Google might be useful https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

[MickEdwards]

"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use therel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines onrel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."

My scenario has completely independent domains served from a central CMS/database, so all that differs is the language content:

• example.co.uk
• example.de
• example.it
• etc...

I'm just not so sure I should be interlinking with every homepage on ever page of each domain with a do follow link, so hesitating on reverting.

[katemorris]

Hi Michael,

First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France.

If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy).

Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer.

If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg