Sitelinks to Sister Companies

[BeckyKey]

Hi

We have a number of sister companies and link to them via a drop down in the footer - are these links as dangerous as anchor text links?

[Highland]

Not really. Google is looking for unnatural links and patterns. A single sitewide footer link isn't going to impact SEO that much. If the sites all share the same server/IP Google will likely just devalue them (not penalize) and move on. If you're still uncertain you can always nofollow them.

The only exception would be if you're trying to link targeted words in the anchor (which does look spammy). Just link the site names.

[EGOL]

This is simply an opinion, based upon observations and interpretation.  I don't know for sure how google views this.  I don't think that anyone outside of Google knows the real answer.   If anyone has their own opinion, I would like to hear it.

If you go to Amazon.com (not the Amazon.com Business site), you will see that they have site-wide links to dozens of their other retail and service properties in the footer.  These go to Zappos, Diapers.com, Casa.com, Goodreads, Woot and lots more.  In my opinion, I believe that these are simply viewed by google as Amazon parent company linking out to their other properties.   If you go to these other properties you will note that none of them have this huge collection of links in the footer.  I see other large companies linking out to their other properties in a similar way.  But these are always going from the parent company out to their smaller web properties.

On the other hand, Hayneedle (a large muti-site retailer who runs over 200 retail domains) had severe ranking problems a couple years ago.  This problem occurred when most of their retail sites had a huge navigation on many of their websites that contained links from lots of their retail sites to lots of their other retails sites.  Hayneedle's rankings recovered somewhat a short time later, when these huge interlinking navigations were removed from their websites.   In my opinion, this was viewed by Google as a manipulative linking scheme because you had sitewide links on lots of domains, each directed to lots of other domains.  This was a huge number of links totaling in the millions.

In my own practice, I own multiple sites, but I don't place site-wide footer links on any of them because I think that it looks irrelevant and dumb.  I also do not believe that it would have much ranking benefit at all.   I believe that Google knows who owns the sites, and I believe that they have enough information to dampen your ability to promote your own sites to higher rankings with a  heavy amount of "manufactured links".  (All of my sites are connected to my personal google account through webmaster tools, so Google knows who owns all of them.  They all also have my adsense codes on them and display ads on every page.)

I don't have fear or hesitate to link from one of my properties to another of my properties if I have relevant content there that exceeds what is available on the linking page. Does that have ranking benefit?  Maybe a little.  But I don't believe that site-wides between your sites are a good idea because there is a lack of relevance.  And I don't believe that your visitors are going to investigate a dropdown menu in the footer to see where it goes.  So, I don't think that there is any reason to do it.

[Highland]

Wayfair is a similar comparison. Wayfair represents a single consolidated site compared to their 200+ domains previously (under the CSN brand). I'm familiar with them since we did similar things back in the day. I'm not sure how applicable it is because we used to do the same mega-spam footers they did. The bulk of their problem (long before Penguin) was that they were what is best termed as incestuous linking schemes. What crib bedding has to do with pool covers is anybody's guess. What likely tripped them up was, back in the day, we all linked keyword rich links to the sites without any regard to relevance. Once Google catches that you have to get rid of it. A single domain is far easier to SEO for, but they probably ultimately consolidated for the sake of advertising (their ads are everywhere). But (on point with the OP) Hayneedle did 301 their old domains to their new consolidated domain, and obviously for SEO benefit. Example

I don't think it's as big a deal now because link wheels like that are long gone. I have also seen other smaller networks arise (i.e. Soap) that link between properties (in the header no less) and do not nofollow anything. It's worth noting that these networks are poorly related (camping vs diapers vs clothing) so I don't think there's any real focus on SEO there (or they just don't care). At best these links carry some minor boost but at worst they carry no weight at all. Either way, if there was a penalty it doesn't show up.

[EGOL]

Thanks, Highland.  I didn't realize that Hayneedle redirected all of those KW domains.   That was a big decision on their part.  I know that the ones that I competed against were redirected but I thought they did that in a single niche only.   Their Hayneedle domain doesn't rank as well as the KW domains, thank goodness.

[BeckyKey]

Thank you both for the responses.

The links aren't there for SEO value, more for business purposes but I'm mindful of any negative affects from Google.