[nova]

A buddy of mine has over the years set up about 10 product sales based sites, most are on the same hosting provider. Since these sites werent created with SEO in mind what he did was have a common footer across the sites, so in effect each site links to all the others in this network.

Some of the sites have a greater number of backlinks from external sites as compared to others.

Now all the sites in this network are PR4 and vary in age from 10 to 3 years old.

Question: Removing the footer and moving the sites to different IP's/C blocks. Worth it? Would this have any positive or negative effect.

The goal is to repurpose these sites into a private blog network which can be used to boost new money sites. And the plan is to remove the footer interlinking,  remove analytics code as well as use privacy protection  on them.

question #2: Some of these sites have inner pages that are PR5  while the home pages are pr4. Would 301 redirecting these inner pages to the home page boost its PR/Authority? The inner pages are defunct in terms of sales value and so are a waste of PR as it were.

Ideas?

Thanks

[TerryKyle]

In my view nova, sitewide footer links are of pretty marginal direct SEO value now BUT can be very useful for boosting PageRank of sites linked to from there.

Is there no way to get any contextual links on to the inner high PR pages, even in a kind of bracketed side comment that doesn't break the flow of the text there?

[RobertoMejia]

I agree. Keep the PR5 pages and just add some contextual links on those pages or something. You could use a 301 and pass some of that link juice if you really wanted to, but it would not be as effective as you'd want it to be.

[Blah Blah Blah]

I have nearly 10,000 free WP themes out there with a footer link to one site. The site that it links to is 10 year old site with a whopping PR2, granted 95% of those links are PR0 or worse there's really no value in them other than getting traffic from the potential click through.

[Fixer]

Hey Nova,

If you are repurposing to use them as part of a network then yes, I would definately move the links as this will be a footprint you want to avoid.

In regards to the inner pages, check all and repurpose all with PR and use these to link to the homepage and other sites (mix it up a little), then do a 404-301 redirect to your homepage for all other inner pages.  I wouldnt 301 all to the main page as if you have a PR5 inner page as well as a PR4 homepage then this is 2 powerful links rather than 1 from just the homepage.

[nova]

TerryKyle, on 17 February 2012 - 08:43, said:

In my view nova, sitewide footer links are of pretty marginal direct SEO value now BUT can be very useful for boosting PageRank of sites linked to from there.

Is there no way to get any contextual links on to the inner high PR pages, even in a kind of bracketed side comment that doesn't break the flow of the text there?

Hi Terry,

Thanks for your inputs. The sites are in his control and can be edited/ redirected etc as one pleases. So your advise it to let the footer links stay as they are and add posts to the money site via contexual links?

The goal was to convert this to a blog network. The sites are currently static HTML.

Thanks

[mofoe]

I spent 2k usd on sidebar links 6 months ago, FA happened. Google discounts them in my own experience. Contextual rules and carries more weight.