Linking Authentic Sites Together - Semi-PBN?

[Leads.Bz]

Recently I've had a lot of ideas of sites to build that all would have some sort of relevance to each other, all that would be relevant to my current business.

For example, say you have sites for: bars/clubs, music festivals, cinemas, etc, one site for each. While these aren't all directly related to each other, they all kind of fall within a category of entertainment and having fun.

Now, I'm not thinking about this as if I were to build a Private Blog Network, but instead each site would actually be valuable to visitors, be content rich, have regular updates and thriving social media etc, as if each were its own individual business.

What would be your opinion on actually linking these together at some point down the line?

I must stress that these would not be like typical PBN sites where the themes are the same, content is spun or badly written, no human touches or actual value, anything spammy etc, these would actually be authentic quality sites that you would reasonably expect to have a thriving community.

Personally, after changing my ways from blackhat to weary-of-linkbuilding whitehat when Penguin 1 was released, I'm aware of what a bad linkbuilding strategy can do and would rather steer clear, however when I compare the plan of these authentic sites I have in my head to the obvious, low quality PBNs that I find competitors use to rank well all the time, I'm coming around to the idea that they may not pose a threat with the way I intend to implement them.

Can I get some thoughts?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

John Mueller from Google recently answered this question at a Webmasters Hangout and his view was that if you have a few of the same brands, like 4-5, that are all related, owned by you and you are just showing people your own network, that there isn't much of an issue doing this at all. Add the links into the footer was also not a problem, as was not needing to add no-follow to them.

However, problems might occur if there are more if it looks like they were being done to try and gain SEO benefits (i.e Link Building).

-Andy

[EGOL]

I believe that the value of one large site would be much higher than a medium size site accompanied by a bunch of hotdog stands.

I'd put the work of these hotdog stands into the main site.  The best time to produce secondary sites is after your main site crushes its niche market.

[Leads.Bz]

Thanks for the input EGOL,

Fully agree with you there, I've always found larger sites to work better than lots of little networks.

With this plan I can get some input from others who would be relevant to each of the secondary sites, and while it obviously will detract me from the main site somewhat, I think there may be potential for some of these to help contribute to the main site's growth in a way that could be worth investing in.

Are there any circumstances where you would take resources away from your main site (before it reaches its full potential) in order to grow a high-potential side-venture?Many thanks

[Leads.Bz]

Thanks Andy,

Will have a look for that hangout (usually don't miss them but don't remember this one).

A little surprised he's OK with not using no-follow but I suppose if you make it really obvious there's a connection between sites, then Google can probably figure out which links to follow or not.

Will make that it's not seen as linkbuilding and instead just referencing our other domains - thanks

[EGOL]

If you had a small niche site with incredible potential and you had key articles that could support that site on your main site, you could move them to the niche site and redirect the URLs.   Or, you could publish them on both sites and use rel=canonical to give the indexing and ranking value to the niche site, while still displaying that content on the main site.

I would only do the above if the amount of content is small compared to the size of the main site.

[Joe.Robison]

Good point EGOL on showing that after you crush your main market there is actually an opportunity to produce secondary sites, I hadn't thought of it in that way before.