Large natural products website owns education website. Should relationship be disclosed?

[JBMediaGroup]

Hello All -

I'm working on a content strategy for a large natural products company. In general it's difficult for articles about the natural products industry written written on commercial company sites to show up in the SERP. Most of the results come from large educational sites and blogs with no obvious affiliation (or products for sale).

This company also owns an educational site - one that would be much easier to get content on the first page of the SERP for. The 2 sites are hosted on the same server.

My question is - does this website relationship look fishy? Is it a grey area to create content for the educational site - content where the purpose is #1 education, but #2 - to promote products from the main site and send traffic to the main site. I do think it's important to note that the main company site does not actual sell any products there (products are sold on Amazon and on shelves in stores).

I appreciate your thoughts!

[UmarKhan]

Hey Justin,

First of all welcome to Moz

Coming to your question, if you think your content is really original, well-written and in-depth as compare to other "large educational sites and blogs" I strongly believe you can outrank them by focusing on hardcore content marketing activities. Though, it will take some time but it's practical.

Coming to other part of the question, it will look fishy if you continuously and un-ncessary linking up your commercial site with this educational site by thin content. If you're just looking to send only traffic to your main site, make content looks original, add other authority links and implement a no-follow tag to your commercial site and play safe.

I also like to know, is this educational site already ranking up? What actually makes it "educational"? Are you referring to any .edu domain here?

Hope this helps!

Umar

[JBMediaGroup]

Hi Umar -

This is good advice, and consistent with my thinking. The educational site is ranking very well and we're in the process of giving it a facelift - new design, etc. It is not a .edu - it is essentially a large blog site that discusses a specific area of homeopathy.

The content produced for the educational site will not be thin. I also plan on introducing more outbound links to other authoritative sites that are not the commercial site to diversify the link profile.

Much appreciated!