Should I link my 3 E-Commerce sites?

[Prime85]

Good Morning,

I have 3 E-Commerce sites that all sell the same products, but have unique content on them (unique text, unique urls, same products)....

Up until now, I have not put any links from one to any of the others...

I just started to wonder about that since these are all related to the same industry, and are owned by 1 company, what would be the downside to linking them...

Does anyone have any advice on if I should link to each site from the other 2 sites?

Also, if you think I should be linking them, please advise how you would do it (on which pages, how many links, anchor texts, etc...)

Thanks a lot!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hmm, I would tend to avoid this.

Think about it

• you have three sites
• they sell the same products

So, if they have unique content, you may have a chance of getting results from all three in the SERPs. If you interlink them, you may as well write a letter to Google HG saying:

"Hey, these sites, they all sell the same stuff and guess what, they have the same owner so you may as well only show one of them.

Matt talks about this here and whilst it is unlikely to generate you any kind of problems unless you do sitewides

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

So, if you were going to cross link them. Do it gently, from a resources page, or even an article talking about the other site rather than some horrid sitewide link with keyword anchor text or via some leaky sitewide nofollow which is just pouring your link juice down the drain.

Ultimately, the best bet would be to combine these three sites into one site and concentrate on marketing that one site properly than trying to manipulate things through this little mini network.

That's my take and it is certainly not something I would advise or do for one of my clients.

Hope this helps!
Marcus