Sitewide Footer Links & Sister Sites

[BeckyKey]

Hi

We have a number of sister sites across Europe - the sites are under a different domain name, but have a very similar layout & product offering.

When looking at duplicate content, they are flagged as being a moderate risk with similar content - we don't duplicate product content, however it's similar.

We also link to them in the footer in a drop down - not anchor text links - however this is still seen by Google.

I don't think I'll be able to remove links to our sister companies, but should I implement the Href lang if the sites are slightly different? Or find another way to link to them?

Here's an example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key & https://www.manutan.fr/fr/maf

[BlueprintMarketing]

they are almost identical normally you want to utilize the same domain name see

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/

https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

I would look at the back link profiles as well as let me know if they are like for like when it comes to text?

sincerely,

Thomas

[Daniel_Morgan]

Hi Becky,

The main reason I think it would be flagged up would be because the links to each sister site are located in the footer and therefore appear on every page of the websites! Perhaps you have thousands of links in total from each site to the other.

I recently had this same issue come up with one of my clients and we chose to build a separate page, linked to when users can select their country. Check out http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ to see what I mean. That way there is just one link to each sister site rather than hundreds or thousands.

That should be a relatively simple, quick fix to implement.

Hope that helps

Daniel

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Yes they're in the footer, does Google still class the fact that it's a drop down as a concern with links if they're in the footer?

I thought as they weren't anchor text links that it wouldn;t be as much of an issue?

[Daniel_Morgan]

Hi Becky,

Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.

Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0

Dan

[BeckyKey]

Hi Dan

Yeh I have looked at that one thank you. It's something I'll need to get buy in from, but worth looking at doing

[BlueprintMarketing]

Daniel is 100% right about that. Rather not it's hreflang  or simply stopping a bunch of links into every  page on your website.

It kills your crawl  budget.

See; https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/top-5-tips-successful-seo-audit/

Daniels advice is excellent I have a client who received 20 as much traffic after approximately seven months of removing links that were on every single page. This led to googlebot indexing much deeper and being able to index things that it was ignoring before.

[BeckyKey]

Hi Thomas,

This is interesting and great advice thank you. I think the hard sell may be internal, but it's something I'll look at proposing to the company.

I'll do my research and put a case together.

Thank you