Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?

[donford]

We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5...

We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process.

I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us.

Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.

[Everett]

Hello Donford,

The easiest thing to do if you are really only concerned about providing a link to more information for the distributor's visitors is to nofollow that link. This way you're not going to chance getting "dinged" for adding 10,000 links all at once.

If you have a few product pages on the manufacturing site that you'd like to improve you can selectively remove the nofollow tag from the link pointing to those pages from the distributor side, but I wouldn't recommend 10,000 followable links from a single domain all at once.

Questions like this are always difficult to answer because Google doesn't treat every site the same. A well-known brand with thousands of high quality links and a trusted, established site that has been in operation for a long time with good user metrics, and has never been penalized can get away with a LOT more than a relatively unknown brand or an "average" site. That is why I recommend starting with the nofollowed links and, if you want, testing the waters by allowing a few of them to be followed.

Please let me know if you feel your question has still not been adequately answered.

Cheers,

Everett

[donford]

Thanks for the response.

I can't agree with it however, maybe I should have posted more information as the reason for 2 sites is actually very important. Our manufacturing site focuses and serves as custom manufacturing site, custom jobs, prototyping and support for the clients is the most important aspect of its existence. Watering it down with standard product lines was not an option. This is where the distributor site comes in, the site servers as an option for customers who request standardized items in which we can and do make, but 99% of the time a person requesting the item wouldn't meet our minimum order quantity. Instead of losing the business out right we work with the distributor to stock our products who can buy them in bulk and resell them in smaller quantities.

This will not change. Not because I say so, but the decision is made way above my pay grade.

As for point 1 you said:

If the manufacturing site is sooooo important that you feel compelled to link to it 10,000 times then maybe you should only have one website?

This is a branding thing, the manufacturing site is a custom manufacture and everything there is mostly geared towards providing information about customer manufacturing and supporting our clients.  I am NOT compelled to generate 10,000 links to this site for the manufacturing sites benefit, rather the distributor sites benefit by getting useful information about product materials. Thus, helping the distributor site.

So the question and decission comes down to this;

If we can provide our users on the distributor site more information via a link, without hurting our manufacturing site, as far as user experiences go I'm all for it. But, if this amount of linking could cause us to get dinged then we will not do it.

Once again I do appreciate your input, and I hope I lad out the case for the two different sites, so my original question can be re-examined.

[EGOL]

I am going to respond in two different ways.....

1. If the manufacturing site is sooooo important that you feel compelled to link to it 10,000 times then maybe you should only have one website?

2. If I owned two websites on the same topic I would seriously consider combining them for SEO reasons.  That gives you a single site with all of the strengths of the two sites together.

Clans unite when facing a foe instead of dividing themselves to be conquered.