Local Site Linking to Corporate Site In Main Menu - Bad for SEO?

[UNIT4]

Hi,

We have  'local' websites for different countries (UK, DE, FR, AP, US etc.) and a corporate website, the local websites are going to be linking back to the corporate website in the main menu (think about us, terms and conditions kind of pages). Any local products will have their own pages on the local website but global products will be linked back to the corporate website.

We will be placing an indication the user will be going to another website next to those menu links that go to the corporate website.

Is there any drawback to this for SEO?  Should we use nofollow in the menu structure of regional websites for these links?

Thanks for your help.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Vicky

Yes, you will completely destroy all local sites and the main site if you get this wrong.

1. The local sites should all be subdirectories of the main site so, for example, website.com/uk, website/com/fr etc.
2. Each site should be a unique entity, all support pages should be duplicated locally as well as listing of all products and services (local and global), with no links back to the mother site apart from maybe one in the 'about us' to show that there is a link between the two sites.
3. Add hreflang directives on every site page to its other versions (all of them) and an hreflang="x-default" to the main site. You need to do this so that Google does not consider each one a duplicate of the other.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

These will specify the location and language of the local sites.

The proposal that there will be multiple links back to the mother site will create an SEO nightmare - just don't do it. (Also, Imagine a basket with multiple items in, some from a local site and others from the mother site! - nightmare)

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

[UNIT4]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for this, the good news is we do already have all the local sites in subfolders and we do already use href lang tags (sorry, probably should have added this to the question).

Unfortuantely we lack the resources internally to manage content locally which is why this new approach has been suggested (and I'm not a fan of it), I suspect the search engines wont like it either.  I just need some ammunition to take back to the team to argue for an alternative.

This is helpful though, thank you!

Vicky

[Nigel_Carr]

Please, could you mark as a 'good answer' if you felt it helpful?

It would be disastrous, to be honest. Not only would it completely confuse teh customer continually flicking from local to the central site, it would ruin the local SEO.

Good Luck

Nigel