Site launched in two other countries - Linking strategy?

[brandmaker]

I have now launched my site in two other countries. All these countries got very similar language, and the most important keywords are only slightly different.

All sites are on different domains, with three different TLD's. There's no links between the sites now.

The sites each have about 100 very important pages, and 500 important pages.

I do want to prioritize one of the sites.

What would be the best SEO/linking strategy for me now? All thoughts at all are highly appreciated.

[tedster]

My viewpoint would be to interlink your own properties only serve your visitors, and not to interlink your own sites for ranking leverage on Google.

To improve Google rankings, you want to get independent and freely given editorial links from a variety of sites - authorities (especially in the content area), top shelf directories, on-theme blogs, bookmarking sites, industry hubs, etc, etc.

[brandmaker]

Thanks for the post, tedster. We're three small countries and people live across borders, but I'm not sure...

The obvious thing to do, I guess, would be to link from pages on the two least important sites to the most important site.

Like:
"Looking for the-other-language <link>keyword1 keywords2<link>?"

- Would this be considered pure black-hat or user friendly?
- How gradually should I add the links?
- Should I only link from 1)a few extremely important pages, 2)the very important pages (100) or 3)also from all the 500 important pages?
...how much is too much?

[HuskyPup]

So, you have example.com, example.net and example.org

Make example.com your priority site and either in the header or lhs navigation of each site, I always do it at the top of the lhs navigation, simply insert:

example.net
example.org

Do not forget to link back from net and org to com.

It's a regular practice for multinational sites, both small and large, with a presence in several countries and is user friendly.

I've been doing this for more than 10 years with absolutely no issues and each TLD ranks extremely well in their country's respective Google SERPs.

[brandmaker]

Hi HuskyPup,

I'm a little afraid of interlinking the whole network - especially linking back from the priority site. Google works in mysterious ways...and this is my living now.

I know big sites normally do it like you described, but I doubt it's the most effective way in terms of ranking important pages. Any thoughts on the option I described in my last post?

[HuskyPup]

The thing is though is that they are related to one another and unless you decide to host each site on a different web server with different registrants and contacts it will be obvious they are related.

For example my .com site ranks mostly #1 for all my keywords and keyphrases in Google.com however it is quite often beaten out of sight for the same/similar word/phrase in Google.in with my .in domain nevertheless it is as easy as one click to go from that Indian site to my .co.uk/cn/asia/etc.

Maybe because I've built these up over the last 15 years and Google has seen/learnt what I have done may have some relevance, who knows?

If you're that concerned why not have the details on your about or contact page? At the end of the day Google will take the site it deems the most significant if there is too close a duplication therefore you will need to let visitors easily know that there are other country-specific sites.