Hi there, I've been discussing a SEO method lately with some friends, that I think might be a little in the grey zone. Let's say I run a site about.. uhm.. bikes. I have the site bikes.com. The site sells "mountain bikes", "sport bikes" and "offroad bikes". So here is the thing. Let's say I make some kind of program, that controlls 1000s of domains. The content of the sites are all related to bikes. I'm assuming I would rank pretty well on bike related terms, but would I be violating any rules with this method? If all the sites look legit - updated regulary, all of them unique (rotating content from a database with toons of articles), nice and clean design and not looking like a typical MFA site. It would even include any ads. I know there is a chance that they might ban some of the automated sites, but bikes.com should really be in any danger zone, would it? If it's a all-whitehat site..
Talking about this stuff is gray hat as they would prefer for us all to be ignorant as to how to work the system. I've heard that spam sites set up to provide quality links works well. More specifically, I've heard of a group of legit looking sites being an excellent catalyst to "clean up" bad links (wiki spam, etc.) so that link value (& theming) is actually passed. Link laundering I believe is the correct term. Never tried it myself because that is a bunch of litter to happen for 1 site to do well. Just do it and keep it away from your "legit" sites. To answer your question it's probably right in the middle as you are not doing any hardcore cracking, automated blog spam or XSS exploits. You might get banned ... you might not. i doubt this would be something that would be a high priority for G to filter out seeing the 1000's of crappier sites that litter the SERPs. I say you get a year or 2 grace anyways before raising any red flags.
I believe that Google takes IP addresses into account when evaluating links and I've heard that having more than say a dozen or so URLs sharing a single IP address will raise eyebrows. In order for your method to work you would need to have a hundred or so IPs - probably on different subnets.
Well, i had a person that created about 200 subdomains on my free hosting servers... All of them were niches,differit content but all linking to same sites... If it woudn't work, he woudn't have done it(and it took him some time, untill he managed to create all the sites)...
This is a hard one to quantify. There are sometimes hundreds of sites sharing a single IP address on the cheaper hosting servers. I build websites and there are a lot of sites that share IP addresses, and they all link back to my website, and I haven't seen any issue with it.
This is gray hat, Google is cracking down more and more on this technique. The site being PROMOTED doesn't get penalized for it in my experience, ONLY these "gray sites" don't seem to live longer then 30 - 60 days in Google before they are totally de-indexed, however Yahoo still eats it up. You have to think, lets say this technique could get bikes.com banned then I'd just do it to my competitors so the chances of bikes.com getting banned is pretty slim to none. I use software to do this for me called TheBlogSolution it works GREAT, I buy some $1 info domains throw each on on some shared hosting account for like $2/mo and then let the software run, its creates 1000s of blogs all on subdomains and then auto updates each day and then pings its self out to all the blog sites.. Then I drop my link in Contextual and boom eazy backlinks Generally these sites are indexed in less then 2 days and start giving you link juice.
that method that you suggested is very hard to pull off and would be easily detected....I barely have enough content for one blog and don't know where you are going to find content for 1,000s. If you have that much to say about bikes, then put it on one site and work on that......In your case, the grey hat method is a lot more work and hassle that doing it legit
i advise you not to go and spend your time with some thing that might disappeared in second, it's a lot of time to create a 1000 website.
in my opinion, google does not like automated web sites. google may consider automatic web site as useless web sites
After all suggestions i would say you try first 100,200 and monitor result then after you go for 1000 because here nobody can say perfectly what happen...
Thousands of links to your website out of nowhere, all new websites, with the same ip, will definitely trigger an alarm at the Googleplex.
ya it seems a little bit extreme making 1000 websites with good quality content in each of them...the time it would take you to make 1000 think of if you just focused on a couple
Only one thing is to be taken into count. Just eradicate all those unethical techniques that you all are aware. Or else you would be in Google Sandbox.