Linking Businesses Together Question...

[likeacharm]

Hi everyone... I was trying to find answer to this question, but it's extremely hard to get anything.
Mostly, answers are too vague, at least for my understanding... I hope You can help me with this:

So, I manage online presence for 5 businesses, with the potential to go to 7-10.

let me quickly list them:

1. Business: Offers 2 type of tours, and accommodation
- One person owns it all under the same company name
- 1 website exists for 3 years, claimed google my business with overall 5.0 from 200+ reviews
- 2 websites to be created by me and claim google my business

2. Business: Offers bigger boat rides
- Owned by a friend of the company no.1
- for some reason he has 2 websites for the same business, claimed google my business with overall 5.0 from few reviews
- Done SEO himself pretty badly, link profile looks terrible, looks like all had to be disavowed

3. Business: Owns smaller boat rides
- Owned by a brother of the company no.1
- I have to create website and claim google my business

4. Business: Owns one of the top accommodations in the city
- Owned by the friend of the company no.1
- I have to create website and claim google my business

5. Business: Owns top accommodation on the island near the city
- has no connection to any of them
- had website that expired, and I picked it up, unclaimed google my business, website has links from cnn, lonelyplanet, guardian...

I come in the play here and want to connect all of them to the "megasite" that will be owned by me, will be kind of a portal for the city with all important things about the history, interesting places, sights... you get the point.

Megasite will be created on expired domain with ok power and clean backlink profile (until a month ago, when I got some wiki spam which I have to dissawow)

So all of their individual websites (or at least most of them) will have links to my "megasite" saying something like "here's the place with all the info about the city", probably on the home page and would point to different pages of my "megasite".

On my "megasite" I would have a loads of categories and would after most of the articles say something like: "Want locals to show You all secret places... book here/check here/whatever". And would push their businesses, but not only theirs.

All of the guys know each other well, and have no problem with being transparent about being under the same "umbrella", but I am unsure how to properly do this.

I'm afraid of being penalized across all sites for doing this... but it wouldn't be anything shady. It's guys coing together and wanting to put their heads together and get more money.

Someone with some experience doing this? Would be highly appreciated

 

[Chris.Roark]

I'm afraid of being penalized across all sites for doing this... but it wouldn't be anything shady. It's guys coing together and wanting to put their heads together and get more money.

Why are you afraid f being penalized? And by whom?

As long as these businesses are legit and they are actually real-location businesses, I don't think you should worry much about this thing.

From a server point of view: Just think about that Cloudflare has hundreds of websites listed under the same IP addresses (for their reverse proxy service) and nobody penalized these domains for sharing the same IP address.

From a business point of view: Your website acts as a marketplace/portal, in the same way tripadvisor or booking.com do.

This is my opinion. It doesn't mean it's right. It's just how I see things.

 

[fb3003]

Hi everyone... I was trying to find answer to this question, but it's extremely hard to get anything.
Mostly, answers are too vague, at least for my understanding... I hope You can help me with this:

So, I manage online presence for 5 businesses, with the potential to go to 7-10.

let me quickly list them:

1. Business: Offers 2 type of tours, and accommodation
- One person owns it all under the same company name
- 1 website exists for 3 years, claimed google my business with overall 5.0 from 200+ reviews
- 2 websites to be created by me and claim google my business

2. Business: Offers bigger boat rides
- Owned by a friend of the company no.1
- for some reason he has 2 websites for the same business, claimed google my business with overall 5.0 from few reviews
- Done SEO himself pretty badly, link profile looks terrible, looks like all had to be disavowed

3. Business: Owns smaller boat rides
- Owned by a brother of the company no.1
- I have to create website and claim google my business

4. Business: Owns one of the top accommodations in the city
- Owned by the friend of the company no.1
- I have to create website and claim google my business

5. Business: Owns top accommodation on the island near the city
- has no connection to any of them
- had website that expired, and I picked it up, unclaimed google my business, website has links from cnn, lonelyplanet, guardian...

I come in the play here and want to connect all of them to the "megasite" that will be owned by me, will be kind of a portal for the city with all important things about the history, interesting places, sights... you get the point.

Megasite will be created on expired domain with ok power and clean backlink profile (until a month ago, when I got some wiki spam which I have to dissawow)

So all of their individual websites (or at least most of them) will have links to my "megasite" saying something like "here's the place with all the info about the city", probably on the home page and would point to different pages of my "megasite".

On my "megasite" I would have a loads of categories and would after most of the articles say something like: "Want locals to show You all secret places... book here/check here/whatever". And would push their businesses, but not only theirs.

All of the guys know each other well, and have no problem with being transparent about being under the same "umbrella", but I am unsure how to properly do this.

I'm afraid of being penalized across all sites for doing this... but it wouldn't be anything shady. It's guys coing together and wanting to put their heads together and get more money.

Someone with some experience doing this? Would be highly appreciated

you are creating a similar model as amazon.com. take a look at the bottom of homepage and see of all of the child businesses that amazons owns.

i own 2 domains. one is the business name and one is the product. don't ask why I did this, but it is what it is. short story, 2 sites share links between each other. this is for legitimate business purposes.

what you need to stay away from is having ALL of your TIER 1's (sites that point to your mega and child site. a child site pointing to mega site, is NOT a tier 1 in this scenario) pointing to all of the sites that you have mentioned at the same time. Now that is leaving a footprint. you can have one tier 1 point to megasite, one point to 2 child sites, one point to 1 child site, one point to mega + child, ...... get creative and try not to have all tier'1 following the same backlink model to your mentioned sites.

on a site note: who told you that the backlink that you got is a toxic or spammy backlink? john mueller himself?! I doubt it. do NOT use disavow tool unless you get a penalty message from google in your search console. google is pretty good at not counting shitty links towards your serp logic.

 

[likeacharm]

Why are you afraid f being penalized? And by whom?

As long as these businesses are legit and they are actually real-location businesses, I don't think you should worry much about this thing.

From a server point of view: Just think about that Cloudflare has hundreds of websites listed under the same IP addresses (for their reverse proxy service) and nobody penalized these domains for sharing the same IP address.

From a business point of view: Your website acts as a marketplace/portal, in the same way tripadvisor or booking.com do.

This is my opinion. It doesn't mean it's right. It's just how I see things.

Well, as far as I see it, it will be some kind of reciprocal linking... or Google might see it that way.
I understand Your point about CloudFlare, but they are huge business and Google might treat them differently than some insignificant small business, and same thing goes for B.com and tripadvisor.

However, thanks for giving me thought food!

you are creating a similar model as amazon.com. take a look at the bottom of homepage and see of all of the child businesses that amazons owns.

i own 2 domains. one is the business name and one is the product. don't ask why I did this, but it is what it is. short story, 2 sites share links between each other. this is for legitimate business purposes.

what you need to stay away from is having ALL of your TIER 1's (sites that point to your mega and child site. a child site pointing to mega site, is NOT a tier 1 in this scenario) pointing to all of the sites that you have mentioned at the same time. Now that is leaving a footprint. you can have one tier 1 point to megasite, one point to 2 child sites, one point to 1 child site, one point to mega + child, ...... get creative and try not to have all tier'1 following the same backlink model to your mentioned sites.

on a site note: who told you that the backlink that you got is a toxic or spammy backlink? john mueller himself?! I doubt it. do NOT use disavow tool unless you get a penalty message from google in your search console. google is pretty good at not counting shitty links towards your serp logic.

I saw that from the beginning as creating something similar to amazon business model, but as I told to @Chris.Roack I don't have confidence I will be treated the same.

By TIER 1's You mean linkbuilding that I would do? Like PBN's and others?

Well, one of the sites from the clients has forum posts with main KW anchor text. Owner tried to do some SEO, it didn't work well.

Megasite got last week over 4,000 links from some shitty Chinese wiki site, so I guessed that should be "addressed"?

Thanks for the remarks btw.

 

[nightflower]

By TIER 1's You mean linkbuilding that I would do? Like PBN's and others?

Tier 1 links are links that point directly at your money site. T2 would be pointing to T1 and so forth.

You will be perfectly fine. Look at Yelp, any directory etc...you’ll find that many businesses with a Yelp profile link back to it “hey check out our reviews on Yelp”.

Here is the thing - make sure they have a reason to link to you. Write a review article, make it sound personal not advertorial, feature them in a category, whatevers...you own the site you decide what they’re featured for haha. That gives them a reason to NATURALLY give you a link - “read X’s review of our tours” or “named the top boat tour of 2019”. (Please don’t actually use those as anchors, you can come up with something far cleaner).


Your comment about T1s and PBNs makes me worried that you aren’t clear on how the two play together. My 2 cents - don’t slam your site with PBNs as a link building strategy, they’re catalysts to go from #5 to #1 once your site already has the authority to get away with it or at least not catch a business-breaking penalty.

 

[fb3003]

@likeacharm take a look at the number one ranked site for online casino: https://www.777.com/. it has links to its sister sites, such as https://www.888casino.com/. there are other sister sites in this ecosystem and they all rank to each other. i still do not see any issue with you wanting to inter link the sites that you have in your ecosystem.