: Should I use sitewide backlinks from relevant niche? I have 4 websites based on a specific niche, So, should I get Sitewide backlinks from all sites to the new one? Example: Site 1 Site 2

@Steve110

Google has hit webmasters with penalties for running Personal Blog Networks (PBN) in the past. A PBN is when you have several websites that link to your main website to rank your main website higher. Google took action against PBNs because they found that people were using black hat tactics in buying domains that had ranking and indexing by Google, putting up a mediocre site on those domains and then linking those domains to their main website. The tactic worked in the past and caused websites to rank much higher than they should of because of this tactic.

Links should flow from websites to your site organically and naturally. It is fine if you have 5 good websites and you want 4 of them to link to your 5th one. There are a lot of major networks that do this when they have sub-sites.

But there is a danger here in that if the algorithm thinks that your 4 websites only exist to link to the 5th one and that the 4 websites have very poor content that this could be classified as a PBN. If your 4 websites are fantastic sites that rank well with Google, and Google trusts these sites as great content, then it could associate your 5th site positively because of its trust with your 4 websites. If on the other hand your 4 websites score poorly with Google, this could pass over negatively to your 5th site. Even if all 5 of your sites are excellent, the risk of a PBN might be high.

I've been considering linking all of my sites to one main network site for some time now, but the risk of being classified incorrectly as a PBN has been worrisome enough for me that I've shied away from it. If I decide to have my sites link to one main site I'm thinking of using the nofollow tag just so that it's not classified as a PBN.

If anyone has any articles or evidence that linking all of your sites to one main site is safe I'd appreciate this information as well.

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