I have a client that sells a line of products nationwide. I thought about doing something differently and went through Google's TOS to make sure this was ok. I didn't really find anything but a sentence which I'll explain further into this post. Like I said, I have another website that I own and use for various things. Nothing big. What I did was make a subdirectory on my site for her website and linked to my client's site. I then made another subdirectory of the main subdirectory and optimized it for "green footballs Springfield Iowa" (making that up of course). I then optimized for the next town "green footballs Brookville KY" - and so on and so forth. A lot of these towns are small - and I've been able with just optimization (no backlinking) been able to rank on the first page - sometimes at #1 or #2. My intended goal is to get targeted traffic from each town even though it be small (the traffic) - and eventually have a hundred pages optimized for a 100 small towns with maybe getting small traffic from each town but getting a lot when you put all the towns together. Anyway, I was looking through to make sure this was ok with Google and I came across that webmasters are not to build "partner pages" with "cross links". Just wondering if I'm ok or not with building pages on my site linking back to my client's site like this. I personally don't see anything wrong since we all create pages on hubpages or Squidoo or whatever - linking back to a client's or our own websites. Any thoughts on this?
Your post is not easy to follow. For example, I can't see where the cross-linking occurs (assuming that by cross-linking you mean reciprocal linking). By "subdirectory" do you just mean a page on your site? Why are you creating pages on your own site and not on your client's site? My short answer is that you are very obviously a beginner at SEO at best, and therefore should not be offering SEO services to your clients, let alone charging money for them.
No - I'm not a beginner at this and I get my clients on the first page a majority of the time - with relevant traffic and a low bounce rate. Maybe I did not explain myself clearly. So - let's do this all over again: I am making sub-directory on one of my sites that links to my client's website. Unfortunately - for this client - I can't get to her code...long story there. This is a very unusual situation - all my other clients I can get to their code. What I'm doing is making a single page for a single small town and optimize it accordingly on one of MY sites. After I do this - I create another page for a different small town. Are you with me so far? So for an example - I have a page optimized for "green footballs springfield NY" and another page optimized for "green footballs greenville OH". I have these pages linked to my client's site. The reason why I'm choosing small towns is that I can easily get ranked on the first page w/out any backlinks - so far, I'm very successful at it. So I combine all these pages that get small amounts of traffic - I end up with a lot of traffic that eventually clicks on a link to my client's site - where she gets a lot of traffic. So my question is this - will Google have a problem with this? I read somewhere where Google doesn't like webmasters building "partner pages and linking them to a main site". I don't think these are partner pages - but I just wanted to make sure. So what say you?