Many SEOs have been very wary of linking between networks, as this is a common footprint of spam sites, and is often done for the sole purpose of spreading PageRank.

However, on the flip side, this is actually something that should be a legitimate practice, because from a user experience perspective that can be very helpful for visitors to your site to be able to easily discover and switch between sites related to that company.

In a recent English/Hindi webmaster hangout, this question was brought up about how to safely link between the sites without coming across as spamming.

From Google’s perspective it comes down to user experience. Is this a good user experience for visitors or are those links placed there specifically for SEO purposes. And yes, many times while SEOs might say it is for usability, it is most often done to spread that PageRank around, particularly to sites that might not rank as well.

But because of the high likelihood that this kind of scenario would be seen as spam, and many SEOs avoid it like the plague, or if they do include the links, they no follow them. But followed links in the current scenario are generally seen is not worth the risk.

But one thing they said is that if your site is penalized for interlinking between network sites, just submit a reconsideration request explaining that these links are there for user experience and not for ranking purposes.

If you do link between your networks and you think it’s good for your users but if you see some sort of manual action can file for a reconsideration request and tell Google that these are actually links between your networks and these aren’t manipulation.

However, you could end up with someone savvy looking at your reconsideration request and deny that those links are there purely for user experience.  But it is interesting that they say this is a solution if you get a manual action for this type of linking, since most SEOs simply remove or nofollow them before filing the reconsideration request… and removing or nofollowing them would be considered best practices for most.

They do disclaim that if you have 100-200 links at the bottom of your pages, this could seem fishy.