Is this a bad strategy - links from multiple sites

same links from different sites

[bendecko]

Hi all,

I own a network of 5 sites.

My business partner is getting clients of ours to link all five sites from their sites. We have hundreds of clients.

So a client might link from www.clientsite.com to www.widgets.com, www.wigdets.co.uk .. .co.nz, .co.za and .ca

Our traffic is dropping, could these two facts be related?

[graeme_p]

If I understand correctly

1) You have 5 sites, which Google can infer are part of the same business

2) Google can probably infer that they are part of the same business.

3) There are lots of other sites which link to all 5 sites.

That is going to look artificial.

[johnliquid]

Hello,

I don't think it is a bad strategy

[martinibuster]

There's a thing called Penguin that, among other things, is supposed to find unnatural links and penalize sites for them. Unnatural links are links that are in one way or another under the control of the publisher who benefits from those links.

In statistical analyses there are signals and patterns that identify groups of links as unnatural.

Good luck.

[bendecko]

Yeah to confirm. Every client that links is requested to link all five sites of ours.

This has been going on for some time, the traffic has continued to drop, but he keeps doing it.

[driller41]

Mix things up much more than you are doing, dont link to all 5 sites, watch the anchor text, dont give them precise generic instructions on what you want them to do - that creates footprints, let clients do things for themselves, you dont want 200 footer links appearing for example.

If you have to manage them then phone and suggest different linking ideas to them, be creative and take your time.

Your present strategy is an approaching train wreck.

[ZydoSEO]

I wouldn't touch this linking strategy with a 10 foot pole LOL. You are asking for trouble. As Graeme_p and Martinibuster pointed out, this is very unnatural and likely easily identified by Google's algorithm.