What is the best practice for linking between own sites in various countries

[commissionshare]

This post is deleted!

[FedeEinhorn]

From my point of view, there's nothing you need to worry about. Do the sites offer different content for each Country? If yes, then you don't have to worry about those links, plus you should add the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to all your pages pointing to the corresponding site in the different language/location, as explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

If you want, and that's up to you as I don't think that could lead to any penalty, you can also add a rel="nofollow" to the links that point to the other Countries' sites.

Hope that helps!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Federico is absolutely correct.

As usual.

If you're looking for someone to confirm that I agree with what he said 100%.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[gfiorelli1]

This video by Matt Cutts is quite (strangely) explicit:

1. Cross linking to the others site's country/language versions is not a problem, and should not be considered a cross-linking scheme thing;
2. It is better, though, not using the footer for those links, but the classic flags/country names selector.

A good alternative for solving this problem is creating a page with all the links to the other versions of site, as the Apple site does (but, please, don't take into consideration the bad geo-targeting Apple is using in term of International SEO, in that sense it is not a great example).

Why is that kind of page useful? It is because you can suggest it as the "x-default" URL in the hreflang="x-default" mark-up (here what Google says about this so forgotten tag).