Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines?

We have a question from Tokyo, Japan, and the question is, suppose I have a site that covers fishing overall site A and I make another fishing site that solely focuses on lure fishing site B.

Does linking to A from B violate guidelines?

I'll make sure that both have high quality content, and I disclose that they are both owned by me.

Okay.

So I'm going to answer exactly the question you asked, and then I'm going to tell why you want to think about the broader picture a little bit as well.

Just linking from A to B is not a violation of our quality guidelines. If you only have two sites that are thematically related, a person on A would be interested in B, then it makes perfect sense to link those two sites.

The problem gets into when you don't have two sites, but you have 50 sites or 80 sites or 150 sites, and then suddenly linking all of those sites starts to look a lot more like a link network and something that's really artificial as opposed to something that's organic.

So if you really do have just a very small number of sites, you can count them on one hand, and they're all very related to each other.

It can make perfect sense to link those together.

It's when you start to get a lot more sites.

You don't need 222 sites about car insurance, right.

And it looks a little weird if you have how do I get my Car Insurance dot net and Where's the cheapcarassurance.Com and I'm making these domain names up?

I'm not saying these particular site owners are bad.

Maybe they're great.

Who knows?

But if you've got 222 different copies of that, usually you're not putting as much work into each individual site, and so as a result, you'll end up with shallow or superficial sites, lower quality content.

You're more likely to see doorways or that sort of thing.

So I understand if you don't maybe want to have just a single site, maybe you want to diversify.

You want to have different sites.

So as long as they are related and it's a relatively small number of sites, and it can make sense to cross link those two together.

But what I wouldn't do is just say, okay, well, that's permission to take my entire link network of 1500 different domains and cross link all those guys, because that can look pretty bad whenever users land on the page.