Another GREAT guest post for the PAP blog. This one was submitted by TheMike537. Sorry for the delay, we had some major connectivity issues in Cyprus.
Recently there was a post on the
Mixing It Up
The only constriction you have with creating these mini sites is making sure that you don’t receive a Google penalty for spammy SEO tactics. To avoid this, there are a few rules you should follow:
Using Different Domains and Hosting
On the forums a lot of people mentioned that by setting up different IP’s on the same hosting block that you should be protected. If you’re a newer affiliate that can be very cost effective, but if you have the dough to spare I’d recommend setting up different hosting accounts for each site. This will insure that from a hosting perspective, you’ll never get caught. Also, make sure to enable private registration for all of your domains, as it has been rumored that Google is using WhoIs data to discoverer networks of sites.
Another easy way to mix things up is to avoid using all .com domains. Throw in a few .org’s or .co.uk’s to throw search engines off, and even a few free blogs at blogspot.com or wordpress.com.
Site Structure
One easy way to avoid network detection is by setting up your smaller sites with different site structure than your main site. For example, don’t make every site you run with the same extension (.htm, .html, .php, etc) or the same file name structure (keyword1-keyword2 or keyword1_keyword2). Also, if you are using redirect folders like many of us are, make sure to rename those or don’t use them on some sites. So if your main site is set up as mysite.com/go/poker-room/ try setting up your new site as mynewsite.com/out/poker-room/. Also, on some of your smallest sites that are driving very little traffic, you can set it up just with straight affiliate links instead of folder redirects to really switch things up.
Setting Up Your Site Network
Once you have multiple internet poker sites, you’ll want to know how to effectively cross link them to get the most link juice to your main site. I like to set it up on three levels:
- You have your main site on top – this is the site you are trying to get the link juice to.
- You have your mini sites on the next level. These sites are usually 20-50 pages, and are somewhat related so a sub-section of your main site. You can have as many of these as you want. These will all reciprocal link to each other, and one way link to your main site.
- Your mini mini sites are the third level. They are 5-10 page sites that are somewhat related to a sub-section of your mini sites. They cross link with eachother, and one way link to their respective mini site.
Now, as I’m sure you know, the above diagram is something that Google can detect very easily, and it’s something that they won’t really like. However, many of the major SEO players in this industry do things similar to this.
The way to avoid detection is to build trust before you start going crazy with the cross linking. Make all of your sites, get them indexed, and build links to each one with free article submissions, press releases, or purchased links. Then, from there, you can begin some light cross linking.
Once they are all indexed and somewhat trusted, you can really ramp it up and throw in all of the links that are listed in the above chart. It is especially important that your main site is already a trusted, aged site to avoid any penalties. Once your site has thousands of backlinks and a few years of age, you can really stretch the boundaries before seeing any sort of penalty.
Basically, this is a great, cost effective way to build targeted backlinks to your site that will never expire. If you have a huge budget it may be more sensible to just buy thousands of links, but if you are a medium sized affiliate the above diagram is a great way to build a nice network of sites, all pushing traffic and PR to your main site, without having to purchase hundreds if not thousands of links.
Top article Mike. Cleared a few things up for me. I’m actually looking into this topic at the monent. Thanks mate.
Thanks man – this obviously isn’t an end-all guide on how to do it, but it should definitely get you going in the right direction.
Why is this better than having one large site that encompasses everything you have on all of the mini sites? Is this strategy purely for linking?
This is something I’ve been trying to play around with recently too.
Thanks for the tips
I’ve also tryed this. What do you do if 1 of the mini sites starts getting more traffic then the main 1? MAke that the main 1 and lead all the other traffic back to there or keep it the way it is?
Thanks for the great post!
I wouldn’t really set it up based on how much traffic they’re receiving. I’d do it so that the site targeting the hardest/biggest keywords is the main site, because that site will need the most link power to rank.
If you have a domain that is http://www.keyword1-keyword2.org it will rank quickly for that exact phrase and will receive traffic, possibly even more traffic than your main site. But, in the long run, if you are targeting major keywords with the main site, once it starts to rank it will get far more traffic/revenue from the niche site.
Plus, in the above situation you get traffic from all of your longtail keyword domains, plus get the link juice to the main site that will need it to rank.
Hey, i posted this a little on the forums but i really do believe that making one site great and doing everything is alot better then having a ton of sites boosting up your main site.
The main reasons why i belive this is:
- Easier to build natural links to sites that are remarkable. IE one great site instead of a ton of crappy sites.
- I still believe google takes overall link profile of a site into account. By this i mean, if your going to build a ton of links to your sub sites it will probably bring more ranking benefit if you just directed those links to your main site instead of creating sub sites.
- It will hard to gain good ranks for the sub sites, none of them will have a high “hub score” or be seen as an “authority” by google.
- It takes a ton of time to setup a new site. New hosting, new class c ip blocks, new design, cms etc. If your doing splogs or something how much weight do you actually think u will create..
Andy, yes the mini sites do take time, but it really depends on how you do them. Blogs for example are very quick to set up and can hold a lot of value over time…Do some quick exchanges, add some regular content and see where it goes from there. Google seems to love blogs now a days.
Mini sites won’t only benefit your “main” site. Whenever you create a new site that you want ranking, if you have a bunch of mini-sites, that’s a great way to get things going. Also, don’t forget that some of your min-sites could actually end up making you some money down the road.
Like you mentioned, the links may not be worth too much, but as it ages the links will also gain more authority. Having some mini-sites to leverage your main project and any future projects can have some major benefits.
I am going the mini sites way, but I can say that it is very hard to run all of them if you don’t have a team. Since I am my own team, you can imagine how tough it is. It took me more than a month to realize that one of my biggest sites were not being indexed correctly, and I lost revenue to this fact.
What I am saying is that by having many sites you have the risk of giving no enough attention to each one.
I feel with mini sites you just want to add static content. I don’t see how you could keep on updating serveral sites. So once you are done adding content to that site there would be very little else to do, except maybe writing some more every now and then and rewording the stuff you have.
This leaves most of your time to focus on your main site or another project whilst still have good mini sites leading peopl to the main.