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We have a suite of sites which are all interlinked by tabs at the top of every page. So site A has tabs for site B, C, D .... at the top of every one of its pages.
Some of the sites have been hit in Googles latest updates, and we are now thinking that the tabs/crosslinking may not be helping. We would still like users to see the tabs, so we are thinking of making them javascript links.
I have a few questions:
1) Is the cross linking likely to cause problems with Google?
2) What type of javascript links should we switch to within the tabs (to make sure Google won't penalise us). We are thinking of calling a function from within the href of the anchor tag.
I ask because I keep reading that Google now follows javascript links - so wonder if our efforts might be in vain.
Incidentally, we are still going to probably link all the home pages together (about 10 sites). If anyone thinks this will be a problem, please shout.
Thanks very much
I presume all 10 sites are on the same ip address. Interlinking them is probably ok, if they are different topics and coming up for very different searches. However, if all ten are focused on the same sector and all appear in the serps for a keyword search, I suspect Google will choose one site and dump the others. My understanding of hilltop is that this can happen at run time.
10 sites interlinking is probably not going to get you banned, but the links may carry little weight and at worst be ignored. More than 10 interlinking sites could start to produce problems. Each site really needs a nice collection of unique links in. The more serious problem is having them all on the same ip address and being 'clumped' together as potentially being part of the same network. It would make sense to me that after google has compiled a set of search results for a given search term, they dump all sites with the same ip except for one.
Your recent drop in rankings is probably more to do with the relevance and quality of your links in and/or duplicate content filters.
I am curious how these sites are doing in Yahoo as I have had some difficulties their and we believe the problem was some sites we had that were interlinked.
Sorry if it's a bit off topic but was curious. Thanks.
Thanks for your replies.
MHes: The sites are distributed over 3 different IP addresses. The site which has been hit most dramatically was actually on its own IP address. It is the oldest and probably the biggest of the sites with its own incoming links. It did however have many, many incoming links from one quality, but off topic site for a 3 month spell recently. These incoming links were by chance dropped the day we took our first hit from Google, so this may be the cause of the drop as you suggest. The site does have many similar pages (but each page is useful and contains different data about different places) - so I guess a duplicate content filter could also be coming in to play.
Randle: The sites typically used to get more than 10x as many click-throughs from Google as from Yahoo or MSN. I don't know if this is the normal ratio to expect, or if it means we weren't doing well in Yahoo/MSN. The site which has been hit most by Google's changes now gets more traffic from Yahoo/MSN than from Google.
Cheers
