So ok - a for-instance question. If one large parent company has a large number of sites, is it ok to cross link between one another? Could this be seen as spam? To what extent could this be seen as link spam - i.e. where can the line be drawn between useful crosslinks and anchor text ridden footers purely for search engines and not for users? Lets take a look at this in action across some of our top serps:
Car Insurance and Uswitch: Taking Uswitch as our example here. Uswitch have always done well in the Google serps but have recently become much stronger in the car insurance serp. They show fewer signs of artificial link growth than say the likes of Endsleigh or Directline - but have many anchor text rich links from within the Scripps Group. This includes sites like upmystreet, shopzilla and many of Scripps’ TV network domains such as the DIY Network.
Just take a look at the footer for each of the Scripps sites - blatant use of anchor text rich links to specific pages on the key network sites and yes - you guessed it - almost every site links to the car insurance page on uswitch, currently ranking 6 in Google for ‘car insurance’.
Mortgage and whatmortgage: Again, here we see a site doing particularly well for a core term by leveraging their parent company’s sites. WhatMortgage is part of the Charterhouse communications group and currently ranks at 9 for ‘mortgage’. A quick scroll down to the footer reveals, yes thats right, a huge block of anchor text heavy links to other sites in the group.
Cheap Flights and Cheapflights: The number 1 ranking site for cheap flights in Google is Cheapflights. Purely down to the domain name? Maybe. Or is this more than the consequent anchor text rich links courtesy of such a great domain name? Take a look at the footer. Cross links to the foreign versions of the site. Take a look at International page and subsequent foreign domains - all crosslinking back to the main UK and US domains with keyword rich anchor text.
Is this penalisable? Are these forms of links underhand and little more than good old link spam or simply good use of internal resource. Who is the bigger network spammer or are all forms just as bad? If Big G were to find a way of algorithmically detecting paid links or started aggressively targeting networks of links, how might it treat sites such as these?