Linking Authentic Sites Together - Semi-PBN?
-
Recently I've had a lot of ideas of sites to build that all would have some sort of relevance to each other, all that would be relevant to my current business.
For example, say you have sites for: bars/clubs, music festivals, cinemas, etc, one site for each. While these aren't all directly related to each other, they all kind of fall within a category of entertainment and having fun.
Now, I'm not thinking about this as if I were to build a Private Blog Network, but instead each site would actually be valuable to visitors, be content rich, have regular updates and thriving social media etc, as if each were its own individual business.
What would be your opinion on actually linking these together at some point down the line?
I must stress that these would not be like typical PBN sites where the themes are the same, content is spun or badly written, no human touches or actual value, anything spammy etc, these would actually be authentic quality sites that you would reasonably expect to have a thriving community.
Personally, after changing my ways from blackhat to weary-of-linkbuilding whitehat when Penguin 1 was released, I'm aware of what a bad linkbuilding strategy can do and would rather steer clear, however when I compare the plan of these authentic sites I have in my head to the obvious, low quality PBNs that I find competitors use to rank well all the time, I'm coming around to the idea that they may not pose a threat with the way I intend to implement them.
Can I get some thoughts?
-
Good point EGOL on showing that after you crush your main market there is actually an opportunity to produce secondary sites, I hadn't thought of it in that way before.
-
If you had a small niche site with incredible potential and you had key articles that could support that site on your main site, you could move them to the niche site and redirect the URLs. Or, you could publish them on both sites and use rel=canonical to give the indexing and ranking value to the niche site, while still displaying that content on the main site.
I would only do the above if the amount of content is small compared to the size of the main site.
-
Thanks Andy,
Will have a look for that hangout (usually don't miss them but don't remember this one).
A little surprised he's OK with not using no-follow but I suppose if you make it really obvious there's a connection between sites, then Google can probably figure out which links to follow or not.
Will make that it's not seen as linkbuilding and instead just referencing our other domains - thanks
-
Thanks for the input EGOL,
Fully agree with you there, I've always found larger sites to work better than lots of little networks.
With this plan I can get some input from others who would be relevant to each of the secondary sites, and while it obviously will detract me from the main site somewhat, I think there may be potential for some of these to help contribute to the main site's growth in a way that could be worth investing in.
Are there any circumstances where you would take resources away from your main site (before it reaches its full potential) in order to grow a high-potential side-venture?Many thanks
-
I believe that the value of one large site would be much higher than a medium size site accompanied by a bunch of hotdog stands.
I'd put the work of these hotdog stands into the main site. The best time to produce secondary sites is after your main site crushes its niche market.
-
Hi,
John Mueller from Google recently answered this question at a Webmasters Hangout and his view was that if you have a few of the same brands, like 4-5, that are all related, owned by you and you are just showing people your own network, that there isn't much of an issue doing this at all. Add the links into the footer was also not a problem, as was not needing to add no-follow to them.
However, problems might occur if there are more if it looks like they were being done to try and gain SEO benefits (i.e Link Building).
-Andy
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
-
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Somebody took an article from my site and posted it on there own site but gave it credit back to my site is this duplicate content?
Hey guys, This question may sound a bit drunk, but someone copied our article and re-posted it on their site the exact article, however the article was credited to our site and the original author of the article had approved the other site could do this. We created the article first though, Will this still be regarded as duplicate content? The owner of the other site has told us it wasn't because they credited it. Any advice would be awesome Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Non Manual penalties, should I trash my site?
My URL is: www.adserve.com.au I get no traffic from google and I am convinced that I have penalties from the links that point to my page. I have written to google previously and they told me that there are no manual penalties on the site. I give up... I am shelving my ENTIRE brand and starting again with a new site, http://www.trusignage.com, I do not want to do this but... If I do a search for
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdAdam
"Using and implementing the AdServe digital menu board system couldn’t be easier! Just get any screen installed by a tradesman or electrician, plug the digital menu board device" two pages from within my site come up but my homepage does not, it comes up when you click on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed" A search for
"The AdServe system comprises of only one tiny component that can plug directly into the HDMI port of a screen. Traditional digital signage systems require drilling into walls, running cables, a bunch of valuable space and the installation of several pieces of costly"
Brings up another 2 pages from my site, when clicking on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed."
My homepage does not even come up... but the homepage of my new site http://www.trusignage.com comes up. My new site is at http://www.trusignage.com there is only 2 pages of duplicate content, the about us and the buy now page.
Is google going to penalise my new site? I WILL NOT DO ANY SEO, only on page......... I wont hire any SEO firm at all. My old site has a few great links to it
http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/06/24/android-digital-signage-closer-adserve/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adserve-digital-signage
I also have many of my REAL youtube videos that link to my site, maybe about 15
If I 301 redirect my penalised site to my new one am I just poisoning my new site as well? I could get the links changed instead. I will have to keep my old site www.adserve.com.au as I have customers who go to that site to lookup my contact details for support etc. will google see the same phone number and address etc and think I am trying to fill google up with duplicate websites? I would really prefer to keep www.adserve.com.au for Australian clients and usewww.trusignage.com for international clients, if the site layout is the same but all of the site passes copyscape then will I get hurt by duplicate content?
Google is ruining me.. I have no money to spend on adwords right now. I have a new highly inovative software product that has taken almost 2 years to develop and I think I deserve more than 4 visits per month. My actual business has been around for 7 years.
I invented SaaS digital signage in 2007 http://youtu.be/-YpyjLALoBU find me some web based digital signage system that was around prior to 2010?
This is me and my product http://youtu.be/ClXSiIA5DRY
Why should my site be treated as trash by google? I have in the past employed a SEO firm and if I search for "If you are looking for the top provider of digital signage in Australia, visit today" I find 70 absolute crap links to my site. I have disvowed them, there must be more links somewhere but I have no money or time to chase down site owners to remove them when I do not even know if I can get them all and have no guarantee that this will even help.. So bottom line, do I need to junk my www.adserve.com.au site? There is no getting away from what some SEO company has spammed in the past?
And again, using a tool to hunt down these spam links and try to get them removed will tie up my own time that needs to be spent on developing my software and I have no cash to pay people to do this for me. [edited by staff because line breaks weren't showing]0 -
Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Same template site same products but different content?
for the sake of this post I am selling lighters. I have 3 domains small-lighters.com medium-lighter.com large-lighters.com On all of the websites I have the same template same images etc and same products. The only difference is the way the content is worded described etc different bullet points. My domains are all strong keyword domains not spammy and bring in type in traffic. Is it ok to continue in this manner in your opinion?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dynamic080 -
How to recover my site from -50 penalty
One of my sites was hit after Google confirmed its panda 3.2 update. The site ranked very well for many heavy traffic keywords in my niche. But all of a sudden, 80% of the keywords which ranked high in the previous dropped 50 in SERP. I know it is a -50 penalty , but i do not know how to recover from it. The link building campaign is almost the same as before and all of the articles are unique. BTW, i have two image ads on the sidebar and 7 affiliate links on the bottom of the page. Any input will be great appreciated !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aoneshosesun0 -
What to do when majority of results have shady links?
So I am doing my back link research for the hosting industry and I am running across two different types of link schemes that make it hard to compete with straight white hat techniques. I am determined to keep our efforts white hat to retain long term value, but at the same time I am constantly tempted to slowly add links in the more grey ways. So here are some of the common practices I see a lot of (e.g. 8 of the top 10 sites for top terms use these). Link Buying/Article Links - You know this one well, their link profile has a 10:1 ratio of keyword links compared to brand name links, and the majority of those keyword links are on nonsensical blogs, or on related "tech" sites but obviously labeled as paid links. - I don't like this much, and have even reported some of these. "Hosted by" - So the majority of hosting companies out there have pre-built collections of templates for wordpress, joomla, and other CMS systems, and they have taken the extra step of putting "Server Hosting by XXXXXX" in the footer of those templates. This leads to thousands of small sites being hosted with the keyword backlinks. While I understand this, at the same time I would hope they wouldn't get credit for links all coming back from IPs that they own. While they aren't creating these sites they know the majority of users won't change the template (or know how to). Lastly there are some "Link to us and get discounts" programs going on with customers as well. So, seeing the linking setup this way, would you try to report each instance you see to Google? If so do you think they would really change anything considering how rampant it is among the results? Lets hear some opinions! In the mean time I am going to go work on my awesome content, press releases, and cross-company promotional campaigns ;).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SL_SEM0