Linda in Lakewood, New Jersey, asks if I have three websites.
Is it a problem or is there a problem to Crosslink websites?
Well, three is not a lot of websites.
But first, I would ask yourself, are these websites sites really related in any kind of sense?
Because if you've got one website, that's about dry cleaners and one website, that's about ancient art and one website that's about mobile phone reviews, it's going to look really weird if you get down to the bottom of the page and you'relike, wait a second.
I thought that I was looking at a cartoon site.
Here I am looking at cartoons, and all of a sudden I browse at the bottom of the page, and I'm looking at auto insurance and coffee tables that has nothing whatsoever to do with this particular site.
So I would ask yourself, how relevant is it?
Three sites is not a lot.
So it's probably not going to be a huge issue.
But 30 sites or 300 sites is absolutely the sort of thing where your competitor or an average user who is landing onthe page is going to be like, Why are all these different sites cross linking?
And what do they really have to do with each other now, ideally, it might be something like a men's clothing page and a woman's clothing site and a children's clothing site.
And if they're relevant, that's the perfect reason to link those three together.
So if it's under the same corporate umbrella or there's agood reason to do it, I don't think that it's any problemat all.
And it is a relatively small number of websites to be linking, but bear in mind as you grow and as you grow, if you have a ton of links down at the bottom of your site, a lot ofregular users will get turned off by that.
And a lot of competitors will be like, Well, why is this person cross linking every single site?
So a good rule of thumb is sort of ask a regular and offthe street.
And if they sort of look at it a little bit strangely, thenyou know that you've probably gone just a little bit too far.