Setting up a separate site for link building
-
We are jump starting a link building campaign for a personal injury law firm.
We're planning on doing things right with earning links to content people will actually want to share, sponsoring local events, etc.
We're a little worried that some good opportunities could be missed due to the fact some people have assumptions about personal injury lawyers and would be hesitant to link to us simply because of our injury, regardless of what we're trying to share/promote.
One solution we're considering is creating a foundation associated with the firm that supports relevant causes and provides the public with educational resources. That might get over our branding hurdle a bit.
We've also discussed setting up a separate site for the foundation and actually building links to it rather than our main site, then linking the foundation site to our main site. The hope would be that we could get more links to the foundation site and it would in turn pass on link juice to our main site.
My concern is whether this strategy makes any sense. We'd be putting good content on this foundation site rather than our main site. How much link juice would actually be passed on to our main site in this case? Would so much be lost that it would negate the whole purpose?
-
Thanks for responses, everybody. Very insightful, as usual.
-
Use the main domain for your promotional items. If the site is not currently set up for that, I would invest your money and time into making the main site as good as it possibly can be. Install a blog, add in content, promote from within.
Your existing domain most likely has weight and authority, and will have more than a new domain registration. Depending upon how you structure the site, you may not even have to brand or constantly remind people it is about or being sponsored by a personal injury law firm. What you are wanting to accomplish is additional exposure whether it be through backlinks, additional visits, etc. When you are planning out your strategy, think of what type of content you are going to include, and where people search for that type of information. Then, go out and participate in those areas or forums/sites/blogs/discussions. This will save you a lot of time from wasted effort in places that have limited exposure or people that are not willing to share.
-
Tough question.
I think the foundation idea is good, you definitely need to distance yourself from the bad name associated with that business sector if you want to rise the probability of gaining good backlinks.
But I would put it in a subfolder on the same domain. And I would design the site and the homepage to give prominent visibility to your foundation.
It would require a lot of effort, time and money to promote the foundation-domain, and the juice/authority/rank/trust you will gain won't be that easy to transfer to the firm-domain, you can't just wait for the foundation-domain to gain trust/authority/rank/juice and then “spam” it with links to the other domain, you won't transfer much juice that way.
On the other side if you build it as a subfolder you may gain less backlinks but each one will give juice to the firm-domain directly, immediately and 100% of that juice.
Also... What Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin or many others would answer to you? Probably, that you should completely forget seo, juice, and so on... And just focus on what is better experience for your users, what is better for the image of that company, what is so completely “white” hat that could be confused with milk? And in your case, what is better than frankly and honestly promote that foundation directly from the firm-domain? It's going to improve confidence and trust for the firm-domain from day one, they would benefit no matter how much easier it's going to make your work trying to gain backlinks.
-
Hi Lee,
The foundation site idea sounds like a real roundabout way of achieving organic traffic and hence sales - which from a high level I'm assuming is what you're trying to achieve. It would perhaps make more sense if you were going to use the Foundation site to drive referrals, or to use for PR, rather than solely for link equity purposes.
It wouldn't take much for Google to work out that the foundation site is a bit of a cynical attempt to gain rankings.
If I was you I'd focus on improving the content and linkability of your client's existing site and address some of the branding issues head on rather than side-stepping them with a sister website. You can incorporate the "foundation" idea into the existing website (perhaps on a subdomain or directory), which if done properly - with valuable content - will earn natural links and therefore gain far more organic value than having a sister website.
George
-
I would not go for the second domain solution with a foundation. Regardless if you generate many links to this site, you will just give a tiny part of link juice to your mainsite through some links. Just imagine the example that another big page is linking to you, you will not automatically get all its link juice, right? Moreover you can get trouble if both domains are registered on the same name or use same IP adresses etc, as google identifies this as your "personal" link farm.
If you really think you will benefit THAT much from a second foundation domain page I would more think about how you get a good amount of the traffic from the foundation site to your mainpage and convert it there. But then I would try to rank only with the foundation domain.
Cheers,
Heiko
-
This would be a no no for me.
Create the content within your domain and try to gain links to it, this will help improve your SEO efforts on the website.
Depending on your CMS you could create a section on your website entitled "Foundation" have the content in here and have it branded slightly differently from your main site, this may encourage others to link to you but you would still have the benefits of the links pointing to your domain.
Also have a search on Google for the terms "link building" and "boring" this will give you some great guides for building links within not so exciting industries!
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
-
Moz bot not discovering important links (high DA sites link)
Moz bot is unable to crawl and discover my links on the high authority websites like microsoft, linkedin, pinterest, etc. Where is the problem?
Link Building | | TechG0 -
Relaunching a site that has had thousands of posts linking to the same 20 articles. How to properly setup internal linking?
I'm in the process of relaunching a music news site (www.prefixmag.com) that once did quite well in search (over a million monthly search visits in its prime). The site got crushed by Panda, etc. and we stopped updating it. I'm starting to do more research but one thing that I noticed was we have modules in the right rail (desktop) that are found on all of our article pages that point to the same posts. (Edit: Added attachment. The links in the right rail under Editor Picks, Features, News, Media, etc. are found on every page of the site). In other words, we have thousands of posts that all link to the same 20 or so articles. Should we not do this if we're not trying to emphasize these posts in Google? Assuming this is the case, what is the proper way to do internal linking? Do we simply setup a sitemap and link to it? I'm hoping to have the thousands of articles we've published over the years have a chance to rank in search again. Also, we have a number of posts that are thin in content should those pages not be submitted in the sitemap? Thanks in advance! 2KmX0
Link Building | | leggo0 -
Unnatural Links To Your Site — Impacts Links warning, Should I do something?
Hi, I got: "Unnatural Links To Your Site — Impacts Links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " I don't see any dropping at rankings, could the best solution here to be, just to leave everything as it is and be more careful with the link building in the future? Or is there a danger that Google gives further penalties if I don't act on this one do something? I am little afraid that if I start removing links, my rankings will drop, even though they have remained same if don't do anything? Any help is appreciated.
Link Building | | pok3rplay3r0 -
Is ListofDomains.org a bad linking site?
I am trying to clean up/disavow bad linking domains and ListofDomains.org appears numerous times. Any idea what this site is about and should it make the disavow list?
Link Building | | khull0 -
Link building for a non-linkable site?
Hello, I am trying to zone in on a link building strategy for a non-linkable site. What I mean by non-linkable is I have a construction site. It's a family owned and operated small business. Our clients are farmers and older people usually. We go do a job, do it right the first time, and leave. Basically even if a couple of people who link to me for some weird reason, this is no way in the realm of 6,000 that my main competition has. I have tried to get as many quality citation resources as possible by using get listed, and white spark. My domain authority is only 16 though, so I must be able to increase this somehow. I have listed with Google +, Bing, Yahoo and every other major citation I could find. So now with trying too increase links with other ideas. I read somewhere to donate to charitable organizations, but if they link back to me as a donor, in an unrelated field, isn't that spammy like? So a construction site donating to a disease website, and then getting a backlink in return, does that look weird. It just seems like there are so many rules that I do not want to mess something up. I do not want get spammy links, but not sure if citations count as links so I am doing a win-win thing? Thanks for any tips Chris
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
Are these links to my site bad?
I am the owner of two diffrent ecommerce sites. Lets call them A and B. Site A is a larg site with ower 5000 pages. In the footer off site A there is a link to site B. Is it bad for site B to get 5000 links (to homepage) from site A? Should i remove these types off links? Thanks for your help!
Link Building | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Link Building for extremely niche industry
I understand that when getting links into your site, they need to be good authority but, importantly, also relevant to the information on your own website. I've seen examples for people to find guest posting opportunities on many sites, but these have been for popular industries with mass amounts of people discussing it (travel blogs, fashion blogs), making guest post opportunities more readily available. The company I work for provide doc storage, scanning and paperless solutions. As you can guess, when following these guides to find blogs on our industry, I have come up short with places to ask to guest post on! So, how would SEOmozzers approach building quality, relevant links for a very niche industry such as ours? Also, we'll be building pages for extremely specific types of files (e.g. Microfiche Scanning, A0 Scanning....). For these pages, how will I be able to find relevant pages on these topics to get a link to, because these will obviously be even more niche than doc scanning? Thank you!
Link Building | | janc0 -
Current best link building practise
Hi guys, Just an open discussion. I don't want to be told to use directories or just 'guest blog'.. What is the best method you are currently using? A lot of my competitors are using older techniques for quick wins but we're wary to do that due to the long term consequences... Thanks
Link Building | | tomcraig860