Cross linking Questions

[Sidrp]

Hello Webmasters...
I have been hearing and reading about not to cross link and how it can affect your rankings. The question I am about to ask might sound stupid but its something i can not completely understand.

I am a webmaster of 6 of our companies sites. We have a parent site and 5 sites dedicated to each product line. As domain names for each product site are more relevant e.g BuymyProduct1.com etc etc..they score higher on the search engines than the parent company site.But now is the dilemma..Do i provide links in the product site promoting our main company or no?? I have done it to see the results. Well our main site is no where in top 3 pages..it does show up on the list later on...

Can any of you guys give me any ideas on how I should approach this situation to improve overall ranking of the sites..

thanks
sid

 

[mThomas]

As long the product sites are not duplicates of each other than linking them to and from your main companies site should be ok. There would be a problem if the sites were mirror sites or very very close in content.

mike

 

[ChrisHirst]

If you are only linking the sites together to get higher rankings then this is the wrong thing to do, you are in danger of creating a 'closed loop'.
This coupled with the fact that the domains will be showing the same registration information on a 'whois' look up will be very likely to earn a penalty with Google.
If the specific product domains do well in the SERPs why should the main company site do better unless you are trying to get that optimised for the same search terms as well.
If you want this to be the case then join all the domains into one site, optimise specific pages\subfolders for the products and use 301 redirects on the product domains, that way the main domain will get the benefit of any backlinks



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[RISTMO]

I don't think that there is nothing wrong with linking all the individual product sites to the main site and the other way around, too. Now if you linked each product site to every other product site and the main one.....not sure, but if the content is different, but of interest to your users, I'd say to go ahead and try if you are still in the "Experimental" stage of getting high rankings, and even if you already have your desired results to link to and from the main site to each of your product sites.

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

http://www.reference-guides.com/

Reference Guides

 

[Sidrp]

Thanks guys for all the great inputs..
heres what I have to say..the sites have different content..well..mostly..coz the sub sites have products information which matches the main site info. Infact the main site is like a union set of all the products site.but the product sites are all different...As far as the rankings go..I am not happy with the way the main site is placed..I have tried doing everyhting right..analyzed the top pages and tried emulating some of their stuff..like keyword density etc..but to no avail.
any thoughts..
thanks
sid