I have 2 sites that focus on Treo smartphones. My big site has been around 4 years, has a PR6, nice SERP's Google and traffic is quite good. About 3 years ago, I created a mobile site and really didn't do much in terms of promoting it other than link from the big site. With the release of a Windows based Treo, I decided to ramp up the new site to provide coverage of this particular model. This started about 5 months ago. I started my SEO efforts (directories, links from other related sites) and the site has received modest traffic and decent SERPs. To avoid any Google issues (thinking the sites are associated and having a negative affect on results), I pulled any related links off my main site. I used to link to the site in the main navigation, since it was the "mobile" portal for the site. Sites are currently hosted at different companies, but were hosted at the same company last year. Now that the site is up and running, I'm trying to figure out how I should promote the two sites from an SEO perspective to get the most from Google. From a marketing perspective, it's quite clear. The new site is a "sister" site that focuses on the one product while the larger site encompasses the whole product line. I'm starting to think about ways to cross-promote between sites, but do not want to jeopardize any Google rankings by placing too many links back and forth. If anything, I'd like to leverage my main site to increase rankings on the new site. Any feedback, suggestions regarding the successful cross promotion, marketing and SEO of these sites is appreciated. Thanks.
I don't think there is any problem in cross-linking the website since they are on different servers. You can create a link on your main website and point it to a page which has details about Windows TREO, and all the links on that page can point to your new website. The page you create about Windows TREO on your old website, would get picked up fast by google since your old website has been around for 4 years and in return it will generate more traffic for your new one. Plus, you should also concentrate on link building of the new website as well.