Backlinking from Cities nearby

[omer]

We have a main site for our business in Charlotte NC. In the past (7 years ago) we created websites for the nearby cities around Charlotte, most of them are 1 page website.

Is it ok to link those sites to our main site or its consider us violation of the google guideline?

 

[James Watt]

It should be safe to link them to the main site, as long as Google doesn't decide you're trying to build a private blog network. There's not really any terms of service for websites, TOS violations really only apply to the local listings themselves. For websites it's more a matter of trying to avoid Google's automated spam algorithms.

For what it's worth, in the future, it's a far better idea to have all the pages for secondary cities on one website instead. I'd hesitate to give explicit advice beyond this without seeing the particulars, but linking things together is not only safe, but probably advisable from a consumer perspective. They'll likely want to read more about the business, and find value in having a place to do it before reaching out.

 

[omer]

Tnx James. Thank you for the detailed answer

 

[SmallBizGeek]

If you link back, you could always make the links rel=nofollow so that no ranking is passed.

 

[SEO Travis]

I would say you are safe for now. Google hasn't been negatively affecting sites with footer backlinks like that. Surely that can change in the future.

 

[Json]

Are all of those new websites under unique server ips & private whois?
If you have any footprints connecting all of those pages together, and you run do follow links.

Then yah, that is an issue.


If you are not trying to rank the main site with them, then just Nofollow the links.
Thats the best practice.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

As Json pointed out, if you don't have them set up in a very efficient way you can forget about any SEO benefit. It could actually do more damage than good.

Since they're satellites of the main website, you are talking more along the lines of a PBN; especially if the whole goal is ranking. Hard to give specific advice without knowing the site/situation, but I will say this isn't the best forum for PBN strategy. Most of the advice here follows Google guidelines/recommendations.