Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines?

What people said

Recommends Max · 2013-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Nofollow links between sites owned by same company”

I don't see why you need to use nofollow here. Google's examples for using nofollow ( link [LINK] ) are: Untrusted content Paid links Crawl prioritization However I can see your thinking behind wanting to use them; your sites are similar in subject and structure. However, linking between your own sites is not a violation of Google guidelines and they say it makes perfect sense; unless you have many, many sites, all on the same subject, which could look like a link network. Here is a recent video from Matt Cutts on this exact subject: Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines? [this video]

Recommends dan · 2013-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “SEO: Should we split the business subjects into three seperate domains or stay with one?”

I've been studying this issue myself lately. Bybe's advice regarding not confusing visitors and building your brand-identity is good. See this for more on that: Matt Cutts on Microsites [LINK] I don't think you'd be penalized however for just three sites linking to each other, especially if they contained different (non-duplicate) content and keywords. Backlinks between the three sites might help to increase your PageRank, if the links contained anchor text with relevant keywords. See this for more: Matt Cutts: Linking multiple sites [this video] Since this is a local business (i.e., not a global retailer), having three sites might help you to market each one independently, while benefiting from

Recommends Marian Popovych · 2013-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does Link exchange technique become down my site?”

Matt Cutts has a video titled "Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines?" See it and make your own conclusions: [this video]

Cites Max · 2013-05 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “PageRank & SEO results of using a different domain for each company product”

Any website that links to another site will help increase its PageRank; in a nutshell that is how PageRank is calculated. So yes, if apple had different product domains pointing to their main site they would be included in the page ranking factor for that domain. If the main company site has links pointing to its other product websites, that will help in the page ranking factors of those other websites, it will not harm the PageRank of the main site - you cannot lose PageRank by linking out. However if you have many sites, say 50+, it might not be a good idea to link them all together, as Matt Cutts recently explained here: [this video] . Yes, if you 301 redirected a website that will negate the

Cites mvark · 2013-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Could crosslinking using very general anchor texts be a reason for a drop in rankings?”

Matt Cutts of Google answered a related question " Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines? [this video] ". According to him it is ok as long as the sites are related and and it's a relatively small number of sites. Answering the question If I have 20 domains, should I link them all together? [LINK] , he says "unless there's a really good reason, I would be a little bit leery of just doing some massive cross-linking scheme between all of them." You may also want to go through these [LINK] videos [LINK] on Google's take on unnatural links Subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools to receive notifications from Google about issues with your website.

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2014-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Can different properties be on multiple domains or should everything be centralized on one?”

Google allows webmasters and business to own multiple domains with different content and have them appear in the search results. However, Google does frown upon "networks of sites" if they get large or spammy. You could cross into bad territory if: Your websites have pretty much the same content with just keywords changed Each site has little content, but links to all the others The number of sites grows too large to be easily manageable (I'd say 50 sites would be the max.) The only reason to have multiple sites is to rank higher in search engines. Google's Matt Cutts has a video about this issue [this video] . He says that similar sites owned by the same owner can exist and can link to each othe

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2015-05 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Two related business (plant nursery & garden designer), same owner. One website or two?”

It partly depends on whether you might want to sell the businesses separately. If the two businesses have a mixed website, you couldn't sell the business separately and have the website go along with it. Also see this very similar question from somebody who asks about a funeral home and several cemeteries: Can different properties be on multiple domains or should everything be centralized on one? [LINK] . To quote some of my advice from that question: Google allows webmasters and business to own multiple domains with different content and have them appear in the search results. However, Google does frown upon "networks of sites" if they get large or spammy. You could cross into bad territory

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2016-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Is submitting a page containing a lot of links to Google so it gets indexed considered bad?”

I'm also wondering what purpose you could have for so many sites, especially the brand variants. It sounds like you may be trying to use them for a link scheme [LINK] against Google's webmaster guidelines. Google's Matt Cutts also warns about too many sites [this video] saying that 80 or 150 similar sites looks spammy.