This question comes up a fair amount when we have business owners who have multiple website – “Should I link and cross link my various web properties?” First, most website owners would simply do this without thought and there is no reason why you should not if you have one or two website properties. In fact, it makes perfect sense to do so and you may actually get some backlink benefits from doing this.
There are however some situations where doing so will be a negative for your organic placement. Here are when you should be careful doing so.
- If you have several websites but you do not reveal that you own the properties and you are actually trying to appear as if you were different businesses, I would not cross link the sites.
- If the content is the same on the web properties, I would not cross link the sites.
- If the businesses are totally different, say one is to sell dog toys and the other is to provide web consulting. I would not cross link the sites.
- If you have created many, many, keyword domains and you are trying to use cross linking these multiple sites for organic placement improvement. I would not cross link the sites. You may have been able to do so before and received a benefit, but not Google is identifying sites using this tactic as link spam and is actively penalizing their organic placement on Google.com.