Interlink Existing Sites to Break Into New Vertical

[frankleeceo]

I am planning to launch a new site in another vertical. The new site will pretty much have completely different kinds of audiences than now, because of different information vertical. I deal with information sites and I plan on to continue doing so. (In a business sense I am trying to diversify my content holdings). What I have been doing in the past is to interlink my relevant new launches within the same vertical together whenever relevant, and that strategy has seemed to work well for me.

However, with the new site in another vertical, I am hesitant to interlink them as they bring pretty much no value to visitors. And can potentially destroy my information relevancy.

Is there anyway that I can use or leverage my existing sites traffic or PR to rank the new site without potentially incurring unforeseen consequences from the Big G?

One thought that I have is the following: Would it work to link out from my existing sites to a property holding site...Like linking to a company website stating that all these properties are own by me. And link to the new launch with the company holding site. Would PR or authority be able to travel that way?

Or it is still a bad idea as the "company" site will not be targetted or relevant to any specific niche.

Do I have to simply suck it up and build the new site in the new vertical as if its completely new without the leverage of my existing sites. Any opinions or strategies are greatly appreciated.

[Hoople]

Linking to a company website stating that all these properties are own by me.

Doing it discreetly on the Contacts page only should be fine. Resist doing it as a 'site wide' footer link.

Do some highly select linking out to amplify the points made in your existing content. For these links choose the most authoritative site on that sub-topic in that vertical.

As you develop '5 star' content on your site to replace these linked resources, drop them.

Look over the existing authoritative sites in that vertical for broken links to references and sub-topic articles/pages that either you offer a better version of or can write up quickly. Site owners most times will be open to someone helping them.

Old school stuff I know, but it's now the time of writing for highly valued usefulness and not the Google algorithm!

[alika]

I have type of sites as you -- e.g. different domains in one vertical catering to different facets of audiences in that vertical

One no-no: do not add the list of your domains in a sidebar (or footer). I did that and got an "Unnatural Inbound Links" message in GWT. I removed the sidebar links to the different domains, filed a reconsideration request and got the "Manual Spam Action Revoked" email

What I do now is to link to the other domains where relevant within the article. So if I have an article in Domain A about a topic that I cover in Domain B, then I link to Domain B from that article. The key of course, is that it has to be relevant, not just linking for linking's sake.

[Rasputin]

IMO you should not interlink them since from google's viewpoint this is exactly the kind of arrangement they are trying to identify as 'link farms', and you would be putting the existing sites at risk by doing this.

I would even be extremely cautious with interlinking between related sites under the same ownership.

I suspect that since penguin 2 they can identify link farms that get 'routed' through a main company site - we got hit and I think that was the cause, but of course can not be certain. I've removed pretty much all interlinking between our sites now and no improvement yet but I don't think penguin has been re-run since.