Linking strategy between my own sites
-
Hi,
I have one main site, let's call it food.com
I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc
food.com is on its own separate dedicated server
the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator
I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other.
So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains?
What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site?
How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?
-
I have a very similar situation to Limens.
Are you guys saying that i should have sites such as:
http://goo.gl/RxU9M & http://goo.gl/AbUKV
redirected (via a 301 redirect ) to my main site which is: http://goo.gl/JgK1e ?
If the answer is yes, should they be redirected to the home page (http://goo.gl/JgK1e) or to the specific pages they are about such as http://goo.gl/oiEeG & http://goo.gl/7nA9E
Sorry if this got a little confusing. Thanks in advance for any advice you guys may have...
-
I was going to create a few small sites that were specific to a service. I was too lazy to do multiple sites so I only did one bigger site. Now everytime I make a new page, it starts ranking immediately on the lower part of page one for my targeted keywords. The site built strength overall. I would probably do exactly as EGOL says and redirect everything to one site.
-
I agree with EGOL; for a few years it seemed that 'microsites' were the way to go, especially in regards to B2C sales. You would have operations like CSN Stores and Net Shops all with hundreds, if not thousands of bizarrely specific domains (e.g. I believe Net Shops had something like LeatherCounterHeightBarstools.com or the like). But now, they've mostly stopped doing that.
In part, it's because they realized that having an individual brand was far better than hundreds of tiny sub-brands (they became WayFair.com and HayNeedle.com respectively). But it was also because having multiple domains increased the headache of maintenance, introduced duplicate content problems, and simply added costs. And lastly, just as EGOL says, once they 301's all those little domains back to their main one, they got tons of link juice and relevance.
-
Good point EGOL.
-
Not an answer to your question... instead saying what i would do if I had a lot of small websites that were variants of a single theme....
I would redirect all ten of the satellite sites to food.com and have a huge kickass site there.
I would do that because all of that content and all of those links likes and tweets happening for a single site would make it very powerful and hard to beat.
You will do more damage with a pump shotgun than ten slingshots.
I would close the hotdog stands.
-
I'm not sure if you should worry about interlinking the sites together. While you might not get extra benefit from them if Google sees that they're all coming from a known network of sites that are interlinked, I would hesitate to believe Google would punish you per se.
For example, Expedia.com has a ton of sites within their company. So does Amazon. Do they get punished for interlinking them all? No.
However, if you're trying to secure extra credit for the links, you might have to get somewhat smart about how you link to each other, but there's plenty of documentation online to explain some of the strategies you can apply to do that.
-
Hi Limens,
Good question. It's not unreasonable to say that this sort of thing happens entirely innocently all the time. For example, I work for a company that has one main site about the company as a whole, and seven other sites to advertise the company's services in different niches like content writing, SEO and web design. So all seven smaller sites will link to the main site and some will link to other small sites.
But when that's all you have, it starts to look suspicious. If your sites all share a Google AdSense account, that's a good way to get caught and penalized by Google. Same thing goes for the IP.
Don't be afraid to interlink the smaller sites to the main cooking site as long as it's natural. In other words, don't get too greedy with anchor text.
As far as interlinking the smaller domains with each other, it's a bit dangerous no matter what you do. Link a few where it makes sense then fill up on good quality links from other unique domains.
Mike
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
The No of Sites linking to www.apollopowersystems.com is 50 as per Alexa, but Moz shows that the no of sites linking is 23\. The no has increased in Alexa but in Moz the no is 23 since 3 months. Why is this Difference?
Hi There, As I am new to SEO, so the problem that I am listing below may seem very naive. Please help me out. Please explain me the difference between the no of backlinks of the website, www.apollopowersystems.com as per the websites below. The nos are completely different as per the websites below: As per www.moz.com the no is 23 As per www.ahrefs.com the no currently is 586 As per www.alexa.com the no is 50 Please tell me why these nos are different. Looking forward to hear from you at the earliest. Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | KDKini0 -
Link Building - Affiliate Link Programs
I'm getting some conflicting information when researching this... I want to create the most organic link building strategy that not only gets high authority sites linking to a website, but relevant websites. I'm creating an affiliate link program where I link to partner and affiliate companies, who in turn link back to me. The question is where to put these links. I was initially thinking of putting them in the footer so they add credibility to every page, and in turn ask my affiliates to do the same thing. However; some sources say that Google no longer looks at links in the footer section. Is it true that Google doesn't count links in footer sections? And do you have any tips on creating this Affiliate Link Program?
Link Building | | reidsteven750 -
Links Removed from Site but not Google Webmaster Tools
I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days. After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed. Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website? Thank you in advance,
Link Building | | kchandler
Kyle0 -
Content Strategy - High Value on Lots of Sites vs. High Value on One Site
Good afternoon Mozzers. I have a discussion based question and I'd be interested to know your thoughts. I currently implement a content strategy where we create a series of high value How-to written articles, relevant to our audience and then work at getting them placed on multiple high value websites. I have just been offered an opportunity with a PR6 domain to create a similar series of content but place it all on their site with links back to ours through a dedicated section. So my question is would I gain more value from small amounts of great content in lots of places vs. a lot of great content in on place? Effectively 1 link from 20 sites vs. 20 links from 1 site.
Link Building | | RobertChapman0 -
Feedback on linking strategy
The amount of requests I get for links is mind numbing. Yet few respond to my request for blog submissions. What is going on?? People want links yet they dont want to write - its not that hard! Rather than ignore all these requests for links i have decided to write the articles for anyone who now requests a link on my website (providing I like the site and its related to my niche area). I charge £9.99 to cover my admin (It will need to go up). I do not want any links back I just want inspiration to write and unique content for my website. So these are my questions to link builders - what do you think? Would you be interested now all the hard work has gone? SEO experts - is this risking my overall site strength?
Link Building | | GardenBeet0 -
How to improve (ASAP) the linking root domain, the followed linking root domains and the linking C-Blocks? Linkbuilding (or whatever) techniques.
I have a small site (.com) like any website in my sector. 30-90 pages. I have no crawls errors. Everythings is fine, just I need to improve my linking root domain, the followed linking root domain and the linking C-Blocks. Example: my competitors have 300 (one of them have 1300) of total links. I have 30. Anyone know some good strategies? techniques? tips? I just dont want to be in a farm directory, I want free links. I'm already running two strategies but it works so slowly. I want something faster at this moment. Also, any recommendation will be thankful.
Link Building | | NicoDavila0 -
When looking at my site in open site explorer the top results are very dodgy spam and porn sites backlinking to us. Is this having a negative impact on our site?
When using open site explorer to check out who is linking to us I was surprised that the top results are spam and porn sites. These are completely irrelevant links. Does this have a negative impact on our site? What can we do to combat this?
Link Building | | AudioBobby0