I am in the process of developing approximately 20 informational websites relating subject matter on the downside of the real estate market. My urls utilized are direct type in .coms with no hyphens and get good traffic (most were parked at sedo over the past three years). The subject matter is all interrelated to each other so the sites developed have internal links to specific subject matter and outbound links to other sites closely related to the subject matter of the site. My question is- am I penalizing myself by cross-linking these sites to each other, or the better question is what is the best strategy to link these sites together without causing search engine headaches.
i agree with disgust ... maybe try a little bit of subdomain building ... ie: subject-matter1.yoururl.com subject-matter1.yoururl.com/subtopic1/ subject-matter2.yoururl.com subject-matter2.yoururl.com/subtopic1/ Does wonders for me!
someone exploring foreclosure might need to consider bankruptcy (a separate site with content appropriate to the subject) asset protection (ditto), short sales (ditto), etc. inversely, someone interested in other areas might migrate to the associated subject matter, that's the idea. we would offer someone interested in or involved in distressed real estate an option to ascend or descend to their level of interest. thanks for your comments.
I've linked my sites like that without a problem, and you could also try the hub-and-spoke method if you have one big, main site.
or the subdomain thing seriously, if your stuff is remotely related, subdomains are the way to go for so many reasons. then you only need to get that domain trusted, not all of your domains... and "link incest" probably won't help you with the sandbox much.
I always interlink my sites. I try to give links from the main body text out to the other sites. Never done me any harm. Rgds
how would you know it never does you harm if you've never done otherwise? I think if you go overboard with it it certainly can cause harm. I also think that anyone with a pre-sandbox domain can get away with a lot more than someone with a new domain. if it was a new domain and I was in your shoes, I'd be careful, but that's just me.
I agree. Plus, I bet you will get penalized if your sites are all linking to each other and hosted on the same IP Block. For those who say "but I'm doing that and I'm doing fine"... no, you just haven't got hit...YET.
Definitely interlink them. One point made by clenard is to put them on a different IP block to be on the safe side. I have sites on the same ip block (I am a risk taker) that have been interlinking for years but they are all on very similar topics and 2 rank #1 in google for their main keywords and 1 ranks #2. It would be foolish not to interlink the sites as visitors to one are the same people that would be interested in the others. I had a conversation about this with the chief technology officer of Match. As he sat in my office he gave me a couple of tips. First he told me to change the domain of one of my sites to a better domain which I also owned and the second piece of advice was to interlink my sites. They have been doing it for years. Check out: citysearch.com match.com personals.com expedia.com etc etc etc.
all of those are established, old, trusted domains. there's a big difference between doing it with domains like that versus some brand new domain you just bought.
if you go the subdomain route try to avoid too many "-" (dashes) .... hockey-players-equipment.yoururl.com/rubber-puck go with ... hockey-equipment.yoururl.com/puck or better yet ... hockeyequipment.yoururl.com/puck
I'm not saying it is going to help I just don't think it is a bad idea. Let me back track after reading cowerts' original post. In his case making 20 good sites this year is going to be tough so I am kind of assuming that this is a long term project making quality sites?? If they are cookie cutter, stamped out adsense sites then unless some serious gray hat SEo is done then it will be a one in a million shot to get them high in the SE's for these highly sought after keywords. If they are quality, content rich, topical sites what would help is getting one of the sites a bunch of high quality incoming links and at least a respectable SE ranking and then adding the links from the first site to the others so they can get spidered quickly. At the end of the day interlinking has been fantastic for me however I have always started with one very well indexed, quality site linking to new sites. Here is a scenario where the subs don't do as well as 2 different sites. You have a great site and domain. It gets to number one in google and you have another domain in the same genre so you make another site with original content. You link the first to the second and now you have 2 sites on the first page of google. Or at least 2 within the first couple of pages. I have never been able to do that with sub domains. With that said I use sub domains on my largest site.
If you want the BEST SEO "bang for the buck.".. 1) diff host for each site 2) do three way linking between the sites 3) no dupe content, or kw.
Excessive crosslinking can damage your ranking within the same C block (IP=xxx.xxx.CCC.xxx) If you have many sites with the same web host, prolific cross-linking can indicate more of a single entity, and less of democratic web voting. Easy to spot, easy to penalize. "This does not apply to a small number of sites hosted on a local server". . Matt Cutts July 2006 "Small number of sites" - less than 10? Bill