Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam team has spoken about how Google identifies sister websites and how they are treated. In a question asked by Adeel from Manchester, Cutts has stressed on using hreflang tag for country code top level domains.
Matt has made following points in his video while answering to this question:
- Google tries its best to show best version of a site to users
- It tries to figure out if two sites are related and the best job is done in this regard.
- Google might not trust links between any given sites on any basis.
- Giving different/too many links in the footer is a spam.
- Google considers what language a user is using or where he comes from so, if you can help it telling the actual versions of your site, it may offer better results to your target users.
He says it’s not a question of worry if ebay.co.uk & ebay.com are inter linked as that’s the ongoing thing but linking to 50 or 100 sites may not be treated as other good links are.
Also Read: How to Find if Your Website Sucks? How to make it Sell?
What Matt suggests for sister websites then?
Matt tells you to make use of hreflang for helping Google serve the right content to users. Or, you can have global website for various country users. The last option for such multi lingual and multi-regional domains is to use a sitemap that guides a user to reach the right spot.
Make your website as per strict Google rules and use the latest tools to do away with search errors. Use right tags to ensure that your website gets searched by relevant users and Google does not find it spammy.