Some webmasters are afraid to link to their own content, for fear of Google penalizing them. Google’s Matt Cutts addresses the following question in today’s Webmaster Help video:
Suppose I have a site that covers fishing overall (A) & I make another fishing site that solely focuses on lure fishing (B). Does linking to A from B violate guidelines? I’ll make sure both have high quality content & disclose that they’re both owned by me.
“Just linking from A to B is not a violation of our quality guidelines,” says Cutts. “If you only have two sites, they’re 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 fifty sites, or eighty sites, or a hundred and fifty 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 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,” he continues. “It’s when you start to get a lot more sites – you know, you don’t need 222 sites about car insurance. It looks a little weird if you have howdoigetmycarinsurance.net and wheresthecheapcarinsurance.com…I’m making these domain names up, so I’m not saying these particular site owners are bad – maybe they’re great. Who knows? But if you have 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…that sort of thing.”
This isn’t the first question Cutts has addressed regarding people linking to their own content in recent days. In another video, the user asked about internal links leading to lower rankings because of the Penguin update. See his response here.
These questions being addressed a year after the Penguin update came out shows that people are being really cautious, and perhaps fearful of Google when it comes to simply linking to their own stuff.