Linking to other country domains

4 sites linking to each other each is country domain of the same company

[zgb999]

We have a client with 4 domains, all of which are targeted to different countries. 3 domains are in the same language and share 80 - 90 % of the pages (80 - 90 % of the pages are the same on those 3 domains as they have information on it which is relevant to all countries). One of the domains is in a second language.

Now those 4 sites are all linked to each other (with nice little country flags). Would the pagerank on Google be better if the sites wouldn't have any reciprocal links? Or is it even a disadvantage to have those kind of links?

Would you recommend that the sites only link
from A to B and C
from B to C and D
from C to D and
from D to A?

[DaveN]

personally i would link them the way in which serves your site visits the best that way you have a valid reason. If the reason is just to gain PR you will most probably get caught out.

DaveN

[lazerzubb]

You will not be degraded due to linking, so you can't lose PageRank.

And as DaveN says, use it with responsibility, as long as it's usefull for the user, you shouldn't have anything to be concerned about.

[heini]

I don't think the different TLDS have any influence on how Google deals with this.
There are two points to look at: duplicate issues and crosslinking issues.
Generally it's not recommendable to have the same content on different pages. I don't neccessarily suppose Google would catch on that and penalize or not rank one of the versions. It might happen though. Interlinking all sites probably increases the risk. To stay clear of this I would suggest to make the pages as different as possible.

Crosslinking also is not without risk. Lots has been written about that here on the board, I would suggest to do a site search and read some. No hard rules here, but lotsof educated opinions.

[zgb999]

The sites are linked to each other in the way they are to show the visitors in which countries the company is active at. So it makes perfect sense for the visitors.

The reason for posting here was because I felt unsure after reading information on this board whether there is a disadvantage in the present linking structure.

Thank you for your feedback!