Backlinks issue

[edward-may]

Hi guys

So I have 3 top level domains - I'm seeing backlinks that point to each other.  Is this something that I need to fix? I'm not too sure if this practice is ethical, but I'm not entirely sure how all the links are pointing towards each other  and if this is something I will get pulled up for how do i go about fixing it?

My 3 domains are as follows:

zenory.com, zenory.com.au and zenory.co.nz

I would appreciate some advice around this!

Cheers

[Alick300]

Hi Justin,

Yes it is not unethical if you have 3 different domain name and they’re all versions of the domain in different countries you can link each other but there is a way to do it.

Please watch this Matt cutts video to know how  should you link all 3 different domain @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzaimchdNpM

Hope that helps.

Thanks

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

It's quite common to have links between different versions of site if they are targeting different countries. It could also be considered good for the user experience to offer the user the choice to choose the site which corresponds to his country.

You just have to make sure that the links between these different versions are voluntary not accidental links. If a user is browsing your site and suddenly switches from to the .com to the .co.nz because the internal links on your site are not properly configured this could be considered as bad practice.

As usual - Screaming Frog is your best friend for this. Crawl the sites, check the pages with outgoing links to the other versions. If the link is accidental - correct it.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk

Thanks again for your help and immediate response!

I did the crawl on the .com and found a few pages under external that link to the co.nz

https://www.zenory.co.nz/blog/psychic-readings-christchurch/

https://www.zenory.co.nz/blog

https://www.zenory.co.nz/privacy

Is there a right practice to go about deleting these?

Cheers

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

If the same page exists as well on the .com version (which seems to be the case) I would replace the .co.nz version by the .com version.

In Screaming Frog under Bulk Export you can export all the outgoing links. This will give you both the pages with outgoing links & the pages where they are linking to. Open in xls - and filter the destination pages on links that contain .co.nz or .com.au (when you are checking the .com version). This will give you all the source pages which need to be updated.

rgds

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk

The last response was the crawl from the .com which brought up the above links

I haven't done a craw just now for the co.nz and under external I found the following

https://www.zenory.com/users/sign_in
https://www.zenory.com/sitemap
https://www.zenory.com/feedback-policy
https://www.zenory.com/psychic-readings/psychics-clairvoyants

But my questions is,  what is the right way for fixing this? I'm guessing I would need to visit each page and delete the links that are linking back to these pages?

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

It depends a bit on where these links are & on how your site is build.

In general - if these links are in the navigation, footer, ...etc (elements which are called on each page) - you probably only need to change them once and then it is ok for the full site.

If these links are inside articles, you will probably have to update them manually. It sometimes is possible to do something like 'find/replace' - so you could replace (as example) all references from zenory.com to zenory.co.nz (for the NZ version) - but again it depends a bit on the platform.

Check with the one who has build your website - changing links manually can be a very annoying & time consuming job (depending on the number of links that need to be changed). A programmer can sometimes find a solution to automate part of it.

rgds,

Dirk