Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.

[mrbobland]

Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.

[DirkC]

I don't think this would be considered a black hat technique, as most corporations with multiple brands are doing this. Just don't try to over optimise the anchor texts and you'll be just fine.

However, I am a bit puzzled by your remark on self referral. If it's a completely different brand, and you want to measure the traffic separately from your corporate brand, you should use a different Analytics property for that site.

If you want to measure the traffic as if both the corporate & the brand site would be one site, one property is ok, but than you have to adapt your analytics tracking code for cross-domaintracking. If you are using universal analytics - you can find here (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en) how you can do that.

rgds,

Dirk

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

No, I don't think you're in any danger here. None at all. These links make complete sense, and you're allowed to link to whoever you want. You're not building a spammy link web, or anything close to that. All that said, just a few weeks ago Rand, in the Whiteboard Friday "Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO", addressed the question "If I have multiple websites all linking back to my main site, does that help or hurt my SEO?"

The take-home is that it probably makes the most sense for the corporate site to build brand pages at sub-directories on the main corporate site, rather than have a bunch of smaller brand sites to promote their products/services.

Hope this helps!

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[mrbobland]

Thanks so much Dirk and Anthony!