Google's John Mueller was asked if it was acceptable to link your brand websites together on a brand page to communicate to your users that the company owns multiple brands. John said, it is pretty common to do so and if done as a reasonable scale, it is fine to do.
The question was posted on Bluesky and said:
If a series of sister brands/websites wants to let their users know that they are related and owned by a lager company and create a partner page to link between each other, will this run the risk of being spammy under Google's eyes?The business wants to let users know that each brand is related and they are getting the same level of service standards set by the business that acquired them.
John Mueller replied on Bluesky:
This seems pretty common, I don't see a problem with it when done at reasonable scale. My expectation would be that the site does better overall with a single presence, but splitting shouldn't cause problems.
So yea, this is fairly common amongst larger brands. But he does think it may make sense to put all the sites together in some cases.
I mean, that would depend on the site. If a news organization owns several news properties, those properties would probably need their own brand names and sites.
Back in 2013, Matt Cutts formerly from Google, said be careful linking too many sites together. The question then was "If I have 20 domains, should I link them all together?" The short answer is, most likely no - you should not link them all together. Then in 2014, he said be careful linking sister sites together. But I guess the advice has changed since then...
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
