I run several sites — should they link to each other?
If you run more than one site — a practice site and a courses site, a shop and a blog, a site per niche — they can quietly work for each other. A link from one site you own to another is a small vote of confidence that search engines and AI assistants can count, and a genuinely useful signpost for your readers. Done carelessly, though, the same links read as a scheme. The difference is entirely in the how.
The one rule: every link must earn its place
A high-quality link exists for the reader of the page it sits on. Your pottery blog's post about glazing links to the glazing course on your courses site because the person reading it may actually want the course — that's an editorial link, and it's worth something. Ten links added because "links are good for SEO" are worth less than nothing. So Bernard's plan states the reason for every single proposed link, and if he can't justify one honestly, it doesn't get proposed. "No genuinely relevant links between these two sites" is a perfectly good answer.
What the careful version looks like
- Contextual links in real sentences, pointing at the specific relevant page — not rows of homepage links in a footer.
- Natural, varied anchor text — the phrase you'd actually write, never the same keyword repeated.
- No tit-for-tat — a link from site A to site B doesn't oblige one back. Each direction earns its own place or doesn't happen.
- One honest family note — a short paragraph on each site's About page naming the sibling sites. Being openly one family is a trust signal, not something to hide.
This is the same ethos as How do I build the authority that makes AI trust me?: signals that are real compound, signals that are manufactured backfire.
How it works with Bernard
Connect your AI account-wide (so it can see all your sites), then run the ready-made Link your sites together task — or paste the prompt below. Bernard surveys every site, presents the full linking plan with the reason for each link, and stops. You strike anything you don't like. Only after your yes does he draft, site by site, and every site's changes wait as a draft for your approval. Run it again in a few months — as the sites grow, new links will have earned their place.
The prompt
“I own several sites here. Survey them all, then propose a plan of high-quality links between them — only links a real reader would thank you for, with the reason stated for every one. Show me the plan and wait for my yes before drafting anything.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- Isn't linking my own sites to each other against Google's rules?
- Not when it's honest. What search engines punish is *scheming* — walls of identical footer links, swapped links with no reason to exist, anchor text stuffed with keywords. A handful of genuinely useful links between openly related sites is normal publishing, and the transparency helps: you're one family, and saying so is a strength.
- How many links should there be?
- Fewer than you think. Bernard adds at most one sibling link per page and a handful per pair of sites in any one run — and he'll tell you honestly when two of your sites have no genuinely relevant link between them. Interlinking accrues over months as the sites grow; it never floods.
- Why does this need my own AI connected account-wide?
- Because the job spans every site you own — Bernard has to read them all to find the links that genuinely earn their place. Connect your AI with an account-wide connection (not a single-site one), then use the ready-made 'Link your sites together' task, or paste the prompt above.
- Does anything go live without me?
- No — twice over. Bernard first shows you the full plan and waits for your yes before drafting a single link, and then every site's changes land as a draft you approve separately.