As an ecommerce entrepreneur, you may well own several websites. Whether the sites all sell similar products or items that are completely unrelated, you’ve probably considered interlinking them in order to boost those sites’ rankings in Google and other search engines. Perhaps you have one site that ranks exceptionally well and another site that could use some help. Naturally you’ve considered linking from the stronger site to the weaker with some fantastic anchor text.

If you can link between your sites in a way that seems natural to real people navigating your site, kudos and go for it! If you own a DIY site and have an article about how to repair antique chair backs using dowels, linking to your site that sells dowels makes total sense. If you’ve got a privacy policy that covers all of your different sites and you link to the covered sites in its text, that makes sense, too.

But unfortunately, interlinking frequently is not in your best interest. Google is kinda like Big Brother. They know things. Like whether sites are owned by the same entity. If you start linking extensively between them in ways that don’t make sense to human viewers, Google will find out about it one way or another and penalize you for it.