Need clarification on Linking strategy and whether I am doing more harm than good?

[Isle_Blue]

I wanted to get an opinion of whether a new strategy is wise or profoundly idiotic. Here is the scenario.

We have a branded site that offers villa rentals around the world but we also have  separately branded geo specific websites that focus on villas rentals at a specific destination meaning the villas are mutually inclusive on the sites but we try to differentiate them with different descriptions and markups.

This is what we did. We have a magazine associated with the global company that posts articles 1 to 2 times a day and it is set up as a subfolder on the global website.  The articles have revelant links to the global company landing pages as well as relevant villa pages. Additionally, we embed links to the geospecific websites as well if an article features a destination, topic or villa that is relevant to both the geospecific and global website. Moreover, In we have aggressively cross linked relevant keywords from specific villa pages (ie villa xyz on Barbados) to the magazine as well as to the root domain of the global website and other relevant pages. But we do not link the geospecific site back to the magazine or global site.

Since we implemented this strategy, the rankings on our global site have dropped and the specific villa page on the global site (villa xyz on Barbados) has dropped precipitously for that villa xyz keyword.

The complicating feature in all of this is that we have been launching new sites and fixes in the past month so I am not exactly sure what is the cause of the drop but I have a suspicion that the aformentioned issue may be a contributing factor.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[VeroBrain]

Hi,

Good question.

• You can link from the main website to the others, passing the good rank. No otherwise. Except a few ones for UX experience.

• It is not recommended to use the exact keyword in the anchor text. You are "donating the rank" and compete with your owns.

• If you have too many outbound links, it looks spam for some crawlers. It has to be equilibrated.

• Visitors that goes directly to a new domain, by not visit a second page in the website, are rising the bounce rate and decrease overall rank due to the algorithms have understood that your visitors leaved due to they had a poor experience. Therefore, in short time will show your website lower in SERPs due to it seems your visitors did not liked what they found and what you promised in your meta tags was not accurate. We know it is not true, but algorithms do not think, they react to signals only.

As far as I understand, many Real Estate blogs are on completely different domains, mostly due to the bounce rate tends to be high, because visitors go to the property itself, they do not to read a second page in the blog. In this case visitors go to the new villa domain, causing damage to the blog; since your blog is in the main website, damaging over all due to bounce rate & UX.

Hope it is clear enough - English is not my first language

Ma Verónica B.

[Isle_Blue]

Thank you very much for your kind and considerate response.

Rob