Linking Commonly Owned Domains

[T-G]

Hi everyone.

Our business has several differant products (tours) which although similar, all operate in differant locations independently of each other, they are essentially all little busiensses doing their own thing.

We'd like to look at selling off a few of the tours in the future and want to give each one it's own domain name, in total we'd have 11 domains, each with it's own hosting etc

The problem is that each domain name would have a common owner, and if we linked between to the sites, we may look like a link farm.

The intent would not be to build rank by linking the site so the obvious answer is to not link them, however it would be handy to promote the other products on each site, a bit like an advertiser would, also we'd like to link all back to our main site to handle bookings and money collection etc.

The main site we currently have would also link to each of the domains through it's navigation, so instead of going to a deep link within the site, it would go to a new domain.

I figure if I put nofollows on links between domains I will be OK. Is this a good assumption?

[inertia]

Originally Posted by T-G

Hi everyone.

Our business has several differant products (tours) which although similar, all operate in differant locations independently of each other, they are essentially all little busiensses doing their own thing.

We'd like to look at selling off a few of the tours in the future and want to give each one it's own domain name, in total we'd have 11 domains, each with it's own hosting etc

The problem is that each domain name would have a common owner, and if we linked between to the sites, we may look like a link farm.

The intent would not be to build rank by linking the site so the obvious answer is to not link them, however it would be handy to promote the other products on each site, a bit like an advertiser would, also we'd like to link all back to our main site to handle bookings and money collection etc.

The main site we currently have would also link to each of the domains through it's navigation, so instead of going to a deep link within the site, it would go to a new domain.

I figure if I put nofollows on links between domains I will be OK. Is this a good assumption?

I personally think that by separating all the tours on to separate domains you are increasing the amount of work you've got to do for little gain. You may sell the individual tours at a later date, but any extra you'll get from there being a website with the business will already have been spent on marketing each individual site.

What I would do is set up one website with a sub domain for each tour. This results in:

• lower hosting costs
• lower seo, marketing, link building costs
• lower domain reg costs

If you really want to set-up the sites separately then don't worry about nofollow. Its a perfectly justifiable way to set-up a bunch of company websites and your intentions are good so why worry? You're links will all be to relevant content for your visitors so it's all good!

[Big Juice]

Make sure that you use privacy filters on the domain names and ensure that they are all on different Class C servers and then research Butterfly or Angel linking strategies. This may be a dated strategy but it will work for your intent.

[ammonetbenson]

There's no downside to this strategy other than hosting costs, and there's plenty of up. But whatever you do, don't use "no follow" otherwise a lot of the value will be lost. You want the engines to follow your links. If there's content, especially unique content, it won't be mistaken for a black link farm.

[claybutler]

Great advice from Inertia.

People stress out way to much about linking issues. Of course you should link together related websites.

Google has so many people on edge. Just do what feels right for your circumstances. Honest linking is never a problem.

[incrediblehelp]

I agree with inertia you are better off building one website for now as you will gain little from building them out separately from an SEO point of view.

[OroLatina]

I must agree with Inertia. We have been considering our own options for our own business, OroLatina.com. Our parent company acquired a silver company and has greatly expanded it diamond business, neither of which are at the core of our business model. We have considered subdomains, but because our trademark is indicative of Gold, silver would be inappropriate as a subdomain.

You can consider another option if you are planning on selling off the tours as individual businesses. Have 11 separate domains that do not link or otherwise affiliate with each other, or sell the company as a whole and let your buyer figure it out. Just be sure to optimize each individual site for the particulars of that specific tour. I looked at one of your tours and noticed that you are not making full use of your keyword space, Title space etc. Certainly one of your keywords should be Australia Tours and/or Australia Site Seeing Tours in addition to the 2 keyword phrases you already have listed. I find it helpful in some places to put misspellings in the keyword space as well. I did a search for Ayers Rock Tours (from Florida, USA) and you were not on the first 3 pages of Google. A little extra work might help you command an extra few dollars. If you do it right, I believe your overall traffic will increase as each individual tour will have specific content for a specific tour at a specific location thus increasing its relevance in specific searches. While we did not use separate domains, we did this with our major category pages (anklets / bracelets etc) and have seen improvement in our ranking & traffic as a result. This method can be applied to any of the above options.

Take a look at your competitors and see what they are doing to help their rankings. We have done fairly well with the search engines ourselves with our SEO efforts, so you can take a look at us if you like and see if we are doing anything that might help you. Note that we have a redesign underway (finally) and just approved a new look & feel which should launch before Thanksgiving so our pages will change some, but our content, links, keywords & density etc will not (they will just be presented in a more clean and less cluttered manner).

My wife and I hope to visit Australia some day soon. What a lovely country!
Cheers,

OroLatina

[srblogger]

If each tour agency is similar but doing their own business, I would like to caution you from having similar sites on different domains. This could be seen as duplicate content and each domain will cancel one another out as they are filtered out by google's duplicate content filters. Be sure that each domain is different, unique and has its own original content.

[edhan]

Yes. I would agree with inertia. Doing so will definitely has more benefit in a long run in terms of SEO and costing.

[astro]

Originally Posted by T-G

Hi everyone.

Our business has several differant products (tours) which although similar, all operate in differant locations independently of each other, they are essentially all little busiensses doing their own thing.

We'd like to look at selling off a few of the tours in the future and want to give each one it's own domain name, in total we'd have 11 domains, each with it's own hosting etc

The problem is that each domain name would have a common owner, and if we linked between to the sites, we may look like a link farm.

The intent would not be to build rank by linking the site so the obvious answer is to not link them, however it would be handy to promote the other products on each site, a bit like an advertiser would, also we'd like to link all back to our main site to handle bookings and money collection etc.

The main site we currently have would also link to each of the domains through it's navigation, so instead of going to a deep link within the site, it would go to a new domain.

I figure if I put nofollows on links between domains I will be OK. Is this a good assumption?

Inertia has made a very valid post and at first it does seem an expensive way round it with different sites selling a different tour. At the end of the day what you are selling is different flavours of the same product..............But what do you mean by "selling off"? Are you intending to "sell off":
1. the tours
2. the web sites with a tour attached

If selling off some of the tours with a website attached then different sites make sense now.

However I have done exactly what you are thinking of doing then linked all the related sites. (one search criteria provides four of my websites in top ten) But all are different !

If you are giving a different domain name to each tour located in a different place, with different people going different places, then each site has unique content. Personally speaking I do not think this will be seen as a link farm. But do not duplicate images and tags either. What you are providing are links to visitors giving them a wider choice of products to choose from.....a good thing.

I would not bother with no follow links, I see 'em I follow on principle! I suspect S.E.'s do to, if only to see why the no follow link is there.

.........but then I am maverick!
/Astro

[tamecrow]

Absolutely keep all the content to one domain. Linking the other domains to your main one shouldn't cause a problem if you have a sufficient number of 'proper' backlinks to water this down. It's not unreasonable that one person would own at least a couple of domains that are related to each other.

[Terry Van Horne]

Originally Posted by Big Juice

Make sure that you use privacy filters on the domain names and ensure that they are all on different Class C servers and then research Butterfly or Angel linking strategies. This may be a dated strategy but it will work for your intent.

Yeah, these privacy filters are not a good idea to use. Although there are several good reasons to use them least of which is to hide the ownership from Google. Matt Cutts has posted (not sure where but I do remember reading it because I went and removed all privacy filters off my sites after reading it) that Googles opinion is that if you are using privacy filters "what are you hiding". Of course an engineer doesn't realize that the registrars sell snail mail lists, that there are companies that send bogus registration invoices to clients and maybe I don't want people to know I own a porn empire. Just another indication of the "kangaroo court" that is in session at the GooglePlex.

[srblogger]

Frankly, I disagree with the people that are telling you to keep all the content on one domain. You mentioned that you might want to sell one of your companies in the future, so if this is the case, you will benefit from having them on different domains. I recently sold one of my companies so I see how having diversified income streams will benefit you in the future.

Yes, having all your different tour companies on different domains will be more expensive in terms of hosting and seo costs, but in the long run you will be more diversified and better positioned to sell one of your companies later.

Be sure that each domain has its own original content. I don't think linking them to one another is a good idea. Just keep them separate and pick one to work on each day. Assuming you don't have more than four or five - it is manageable.

[inertia]

Originally Posted by srblogger

I don't think linking them to one another is a good idea. Just keep them separate and pick one to work on each day. Assuming you don't have more than four or five - it is manageable.

Why wouldnt you link them together?

[freecall]

I currently have hundreds of domain names all property and travel related as well as a main property portal.

Each different domain is relevant to a country and has unique content on it - the only thing that is common between the sites and the portal is the actual property listings. IE property for sale in italy will appear on the dedicated Italy site as well as the main portal site but everything else is different including the design

What if any problems does anyone forsee I may have inrelation to the post above?

Thanks

Les

[RichAtVNS]

Originally Posted by T-G

Hi everyone.
differant locations independently of each other, they are essentially all little busiensses doing their own thing.

I disagree with Interia strongly.

If they are separate businesses it will be much easier when it comes time to sell them off individually... WHICH IS ALREADY THE PLAN!

Also different businesses have different feels and apply to different clientele.

For instance I would hope if they are creative that there are different looks for each site.

For instance:
a scuba diving tour would certainly be presented differently
then a wine tasting tour and very dfiierently then a walking tour for architecture.


Add to the fact that subdomains are hard to remember for clientele or require navigation from tha parent domain.
Which is exactly one of the things I think T-G is trying to avoid.

Finally T-G when its time to sell a tour line you can get paid more for the fact that it has a separately running domain already crafted and if it links back to your other sites until the new owners modify it (which in the real world may be quite some time) you will still derive possible leads from the traffic.

If it is a subdomain then T-G will have to take the effort of removing it from his server and the possible hit from all the unreachable hits.

[RichAtVNS]

Originally Posted by astro

I would not bother with no follow links, I see 'em I follow on principle! I suspect S.E.'s do to, if only to see why the no follow link is there.

.........but then I am maverick!
/Astro

Google's and microsoft's and many other well behaved bots most certainly do not spider no-follow links (only scrappers don't and we know that they will do anything to steal content)... I have verified this in tracking logs many times.

We were having a problem with bots/spiders adding items to shopping carts by following the add to cart links (which reserves product out of inventory for 45 minutes to avoid double selling).

When you are using real inventory levels and clients want the last few items of a product this is very very very big deal .... it is lost sales ... extremely problematic!

As soon as we added the no-follows we no longer had the big boys calling our add product links.

So be careful about calling yourself a maverick when you don't understand what is going on,
Afterall McCain claims to be a maverick and all he has shown recently is being out of touch and uniformed...... not a good thing.

[JoomlaSecretWeapon.com]

Greetings,

inertia makes the most valid points. As long as there is LEGITIMATE reason, and ORIGINAL content on each domain, you shouldn't have a problem.

I always ask myself this question: "Does this domain stand on it's own?" Does it offer hole and unique content on it's own, and if so, there shouldn't be any issue with linking to another commonly owned domain.

Good luck,
--
Jeffrey Cleary
Unlock the SEO Power of Joomla!

Download the Ultimate Joomla Guide FREE

[ash]

We (at work) have a PR8 home page flagship site that is part of around 20 company sites that link to one another from every page (navbar). There is no penalty. We think it is perfectly legitimate to send customers to our related companies.

Linking to your own sites is fine, provided each site has unique content. Get 11 different templates. Rework the similar content. There will be a strong temptation to copy the same text from time to time, so watch out for that.

The domains will have aged when you sell the businesses and will help each site.

[adtastichosting]

Overall some good feedback has been presented here. As a professional search marketer with over 10 years experience at this game and that consistently gets my clients into the top ten of Google on competitive keywords and phrases I would like to clarify a few of the points based upon my own experience and knowledge and understanding of Google.
First of all, with respect to the leading theme of the original posts which is whether or not to split the site(s) into their own domains with separate hosting packages, I say a resounding yes! And here are just a few of my arguments for why:

1. Many hosting companies, including my own, offer low cost hosting packages which allow you to host more than one domain under the same hosting account all for one price. This feature would allow you to host all of the domains under one hosting account. Or, for ease of transfer and expediency thereof you could certainly purchase individual hosting accounts cheaply enough.

2. Whether or not the domains are all hosted under different class c IP addresses is irrelevant in this situation. Anyone that argues otherwise truly doesn't understand the reason for doing this nor has likely performed sufficient case studies to understand when this is appropriate. I have many domains through my business Adtastic Hosting which are not only hosted under the same Class C IP address, linked to each other in varying ways and even in some instances have redundant content, all virtually without penalty whatsoever as far as rankings in the Serps (Search engine ranking position) (In fact rank in the top ten on Google on competitive terms and phrases) or loss of page rank.
Because your business sites are all obviously linked/interrelated to each other it only makes perfect sense they will all be hosted under the same Class C Ip Address. My sense is that Google would not penalize you for this unless you are doing other things in relation to the SEO that would be considered "Black hat" seo such as paid links, keyword spamming, hidden text, tiny text, and other forms of obvious se spamming etc., or unless you have so many sites that it tips the scale towards making you look like you are trying to spam the search engine for relevancy. And, this last point is the whole reason for the "penalty of sites on the same class c ip address" in that it is devised to ban sites that are obviously "spamming" the search engine for relevancy by creating multitudes of sites. Google knows that legitimate comapnies will have multiple sites under the same class c ip address. My company is legitimate and has multiple sites under the same class c ip address and is not penalized for this. You have to understand their process for this and know where the penalties will kick in and why so you can stay under that radar and in this situation I do not believe as I have stated there would be such a penalty.

3. I say split the sites up. One of the reasons I say this which no one has mentioned is for purely SEO reasons. If you have ten sites all as one and you split them into ten sites now you have ten opportunities to rank them into the top ten of Google. I have a client that has 68 websites all related to the same theme/product/service. All 68 of the websites have the exact same content, word for word. All 68 of the websites are hosted under the same hosting account. All of the sites are listed in the top 25 on most of the keywords and phrases related to the client business.
AND, if you do a search for one of the most competitive key phrases for this particular niche, 8 of the 10 sites are in the top ten of Google! Now, exactly what does that say about hosting on different class c ip addies, having redundant content or linking sites together??? it all comes down to what you are doing, how you are doing it, why you are doing it, what it means and the overall relevancy, amongst other factors. In fact I have many clients that have multiple sites with redundant content without penalty. You have to understand how and when you can get away with this and for that you truly have to understand how google works to the greatest extreme. That is better left for the true SEO professionals -it's what they do and live and breath by.
(Now with that said- I do not encourage you to have redundant content because again, unless you know how to get away with it and are a professional at it you are better served by having the sites be as unique as possible or at least each have a different slant on the same information)

4. You say you plan to at some point market or sell some of the websites. this is another reason to build them out separately. This will potentially enhance their value as you will be building out their search engine ranking and overall page rank which could help you when you go to sell them.

5. Rel No follow. Don't bother. Better to link them together and get/give whatever juice from that you can. Trick is to do it in the right way with respect to the anchor/linking text so it doesn't come off as "site" spamming the SE (which is why the argument about diff class c ip addies) and shows a legitimate reason the sites are tied together as a business. Use a rel no follow and you might cause a red flag anyways that all the sites are built to spam the search engine for relevancy and the rel no follow is there to help build up the individual PR of the sites, or something to that effect.

Those are my thoughts and ideas on the subject. Another thing to remember is that everthing we say today about SEO might be gone away tomorrow. It is an evolving and constantly changing process which is another reason why to employ a professional when you want really qualified advice about SEO.

Best of luck,

Thomas
Search Marketing Specialist - Adtastic Hosting/Web-SEM

[blogdawg1]

My 2 cents: Don't worry at all about linking them to each other. There are not enough to be considered a link farm and it seems to make total sense. I would worry more about the maintenance and dupe content.

[srblogger]

I agree - duplicate content could be very bad. But I also think that linking them together could cause the appearance of a link farm and cause penalties.

[inertia]

Well at least most of us agree on one thing! Don't worry about link farms penalties or adding nofollow.

With regards to splitting the sites up I guess it comes down to 2 arguments... SEO or the future of the business. You will definitely find SEO/ranking/link building/marketing (etc) easier and less work with one site. I don't think anyone can argue with that. What would you rather face, getting ten sites in top listings or one?

The question is... what do you crave more, the rankings or the future capital created from selling these sites with the tours. But keep in mind that these sites will still need a work when you sell them. For one, the online payment system links back to your main site.

I dont agree with RichAtVNS's point about each tour being different and needing a different site. The OP said:

Our business has several differant products (tours) which although similar, all operate in differant locations independently of each other, they are essentially all little busiensses doing their own thing.

My bloding. From this statement i would conclude that these tours are simialr enough to be contained in one site. If you optimise the site well enough any variations will be aparent in the search results.

So be careful about calling yourself a maverick when you don't understand what is going on,

Be carefull, one day Google might just turn nofollow off....

[Terry Van Horne]

There was a time when cross linking even related business sites was risky enough to warrant advising against it for SEO, however, even when I didn't advise using the strategy for SEO I did realize that from a marketing standpoint it had huge upside. I put PPC landing pages on dedicated sites so I can minimize user "distraction" since... sorry to say the average user has the attention span of a gnat. The downside is any site that wants into Google's organic SERP needs links so... promoting the micro sites will be time consuming, but, that downside has an upside in I have not seen where submitting multiple sites in one vist resulted in problems. Also IMO, Social networking and tagging sites are more condusive to this strategy than directory or old style relationship linking.

[coupe74]

The value of your business is in relation to the profit it generates in excess of being paid a market rate for the owner's labor (ie "dividends" per the Income Approach per IRS Revenue Ruling 59-60, which is used by most business appraisers and buyers). The only impact the website would have on value is represented in the profit it generates for the business. Having a separate domain would rule out loss of that revenue stream at time of business sale due to a change in marketing, a theoretical good thing, so I'd vote for separate domains separately SEOed for at least 2 fiscal quarters prior to sale. Value of tour businesses tends to be around 3-5 times dividends.

-KB, a 25 year licensed business appraiser and broker

[full house]

I think it won't hurt as long as its not the same IP range.