Links between our own sites.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Ian Macleod: A few years back when Google panda and penguin hit our network of related websites, (with everyone panicking and scrambling for answers) we decided that passing link juice between websites that we owned could have been effecting our rankings. A decision was taken to use the No follow attribute on all links from our interconnected websites. ;
  Research of other high ranking websites, it appears the use of No follows is relatively low. Do you have any thoughts on whether we could revert to removing some or all of these no follow attributes? ;
  But more importantly would there be a benefit or not? more than 50% of our links are no follow.
• 
  Greg Baka: Over-optimized link profiles is a Penguin problem (not Panda). Penguin will usually get you for having too high a percentage of commercial anchor text (money keywords).
  
  Since you control a collection of sites linking to each other, one fix would have been to make the links nofollow (which you did).
  
  Another solution would have been to leave them as follow links, but change the anchor text to be non-commercial. Non-commercial is text like brand name (Amazon), site name (amazon,com), url (http://amazon,com), or generic words (View Site, Check this out, Great deals, etc)
  
  If you already rank well, probably best to leave these as nofollow. If you need a rank boost and are willing to gamble, you can try switching to non-commercial follow links. I would test it on your least important site by changing the links pointing to that one first. If it soars, roll on. If it sinks, switch the links back to nofollow.
• 
  Ian Macleod: +Greg Baka ;
  Thanks Greg,
  
  I'll give that a go starting with one of the lesser properties. Good advice.
• 
  Pulkit Khurana: in addition to what Greg said, remember that a balance of dofollow & nofollow links usually work the best.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:06:51 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/links_between_our_own_sites +Ian Macleod
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on.
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
  
• 
  Chuck Aikens: One more point is that site-wide links in footer and side-bar are viewed differently than in-body links in the content or a link on the home page.
  
  When we see companies inter-linking their owned websites, we often see them do it in a site-wide footer link OR side link versus figuring out to how to link in the body content.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:06:51 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/links_between_our_own_sites +Ian Macleod
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on.
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.