Linking Websites for Multiple Offices

[leightheman]

Hi Guys,

We have a building company - company.com.

We have 60 offices across Australia and NZ.

We have two corporate websites company.com.au and company.co.nz.

These were older style sites in frames etc and not good for google.

So we created a 'local site' for each office on a separate domain - eg www.company-maroochydore.com.au , www.company-capalaba.com.au etc.

We then just link the corporate site to these local sites. So if they go to the local site, then click on an office and where they used to get a page just talking about that office, it now goes to their local site.

My question is this - on each local site - if we have a page which lists all the other offices and then hyperlinks to those offices - will this be classified as black hat - a link ring or something like that?

Obviously it is all legit as we want people if they go to a local site to be able to see all the other offices - and then click on another office and be taken there if they want.

So any advice would be very helpful/

Thanks, Leigh

[edited by: goodroi at 12:49 pm (utc) on Jun 8, 2012]
[edit reason] Please no specific urls or keywords [/edit]

[goodroi]

Interlinking relevant company owned websites generally does not lead to penalties but it might not be the best use of your resources. Adding 60 office links to every page is probably not the best use of your link juice. Plus Google tends to devalue ROS navigation links. I would try to build the links to your local offices into relevant content. When you post an announcement about a new building project in Syndney, make sure to link to the Sydney office from within that announcement.

I also don't understand why you didn't fix the problems with the two main sites instead of launching 60 new sites. That makes me think you might have been looking for a shortcut. Admittedly I used to do shortcuts of launching mini-sites and it used to work great. Now it is generally better for long term profits to build a big site with good quality signals for Google to see. You can debate the many pros & cons of running a big site vs. 60 local mini sites.

[HuskyPup]

Have you considered a .tel site? You could list all your various branches very easily.

Alternatively why not a .info site with a contact page that lists all office locations then you only have to change one page for all sites to be updated.

Personally my contact page lists 12 global offices as follows:

Country/Region Location E-mail Phone Fax WWW

This works extremely well for me, under location I only mention the city/town, not the full address.

[HuskyPup]

Oh, and by the way, welcome to WebmasterWorld leightheman

[canuckseo]

I have a client with a similar situation - what we did was link every site to the parent sites and then created groups of 5 or 6 sites which linked to each other. These groups were geographic in nature - they linked to the 5 or 6 closest to each other. Then 1 from each group linked to 1 other from another group. We started with 35 sites - created 7 groups of 5 sites each - each group links to each other group by only 1 site within the group - all 35 sites link to the parent site(s)

[leightheman]

Hi Guys -

Thanks for the replies.

We chose the 60 local sites as it was alot easier to manage for each local franchisee, (eg with google places, analytics, facebook etc) and helped make SEO up to them as well instead of us doing it all.

No-one has really siad this will hurt our SEO - and we area legit company with that many offices so I will see what happens,

Thanks again.