Link building strategy - black hat or white hat?
-
I have a competitor who always ranks very on alot keywords relevant to our business and using Open Site Explorer I note they have a tremendous amount of links. I also noticed that it appears their web company has gone out and set up numerous websites with relevant content, and then have linked back to the competitors main site. Is this kosher? I ask because before I settled on my current domain name, I purchased several keyword rich domain names; should I be thinking of setting up websites with relevant (and original) content and link back to my main site?
-
We've seen a great potential here with some of our projects' competitors and are also thinking that there's a point to go for this strategy ... as long as you're not promoting one site that then links to your main site, but use your satellite sites to promote the main site, I believe there's a good potential.
-
I would agree but I'd add a limit to how many satellite sites you create. Google is a registrar and they could possibly find out about these sites. So don't use this as your main link strategy by any means. We usually create 4-5 satellite sites (wordpress blogs) and do what the above poster suggested.
-
That depends on your time and resources to build and market them - better to go with a solid single one then 10 weak ones.
Best scenario is 10+ solid ones
-
great advice, how many satellite sites would you recommend?
10 or so?
-
Thanks everyone for the answers; they were all extremely helpful.
-
Its all natural to me, I think that a white hat, gray hat or black hat depends on the intention of the webmaster. If those micro sites don't encroach on any google guidelines then it is okay. ^_^
-
Not black hat, but on the other hand, perhaps not worth it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
But if you go for it, then eyepaq has a lot of good advice.
-
I am doing the same thing for several projects. If done with extra care there is nothing wrong with it.
There is no black and white hat seo - there are no clear rules - we're all cowboys.
There is nothing white with anything we do - [natural links] is ... white - and that is not sustained by anyone - it's just natural - it happens. If you have the best site ever you don't need SEO to improve the traffic and make it look natural as you force it
If you have good domains you can build quality content sites and use a solid and not aggressive link building techniques to your main site. You must however host those satellite domains on different hosting accounts (different IPs).
In my opinion this strategy works and works great. It will give you more options in the Search results, options that you can control and it will rise your main domain because of the links that will point to this domain.
However is time consuming as you need to do SEO sessions for each satellite but is worth it, especially if you have great domain names for those satellites websites.
There are a few things you should consider (again, this is just a suggestion):
1. Don't host the satellites on the same IP class.
2. Don't use one page / Landing page and link to your main domain.
3. Treat them as independent projects with separate accounts on Social networks, blogs, submit articles to digg or whatever in each site name.
4. Build links to those satellites - you can risk some shady techniques as the risk is not as high as with the main brand.
5. Don't place junk or duplicate content but if you do make sure it's from your competitor as maybe you will outrank them in the future - just kidding on the last part... or not ?
I don't think this technique can be called spam if you do build good content sites on those satellites and use the juice to boost your main brand.
-
I would certainly rate this strategy as grey if not black and avoid it. This is one of the area in search marketing where lot of sites tend to get away with but may soon face consequences. SEO / Link building companies mainly located overseas rely on this technique heavily.
It is definitely painful and unfair when a competitor with spam links ranks well for highly competitive keywords set while a professional SEO spends months working hard playing the clean game. However, the reward from white hat is unmatched.
One last thing that I would like to point out is links from website hosted on the same IP blocks are less valuable links from different IP blocks. This is same as the domain diversity concept.
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
-
Good Collaboration resources for link building
We have recently come across this site in our work on a website: https://collabosaurus.com We are wondering if there are any other collaborative tools or sites like this that may be effective for partnering or matching with people for link building purposes. If anyone is aware of anything similar, we'd love to hear about it. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Gavo1 -
We are moving to HTTPS and wanted to know if our link building efforts were in vain or will the link juice pass to HTTPS?
We are switching to HTTPS and want to make sure the links we've gotten in the past will still transfer since they are pointing to HTTP? I'd hate to go back through and ask people to please add an s to the link.
Link Building | | bryant25560 -
How many links per week/month should a link building campaign acquire?
I am running a linkbuilding campaign for my company. I am mostly focusing on guest blogging opportunities and responding to emails from HARO. How many links would I have to acquire each week or month to be considered doing a good job over a 6 month or a year time period? Thank you,
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Link building for eCommerce website (Software Products)
Hi. We have two websites, where we develop extensions and templates for various CMS. Thats like , we have around 500+ specific products pages now and we have optimized each and every product page with natural SEO techniques. No over at all. Im very specific about it. But I want to know, how to make a link building plan for those sites. Can anyone help ?
Link Building | | mageclub0 -
LINK BUILDING - Does it really matter if the link is not relevant?
Hi guys, I have just done a lot of link buillding and I thought I am just going to link build and I am not going to go after RELVANT links. I have property/real esate website and I have been any kind of link builidng and I have noteced some good increases in rankings.. So my questions is; Does it really matter if the link is relvant to property or real estate if I have got ranking increases? Or will it later harm my site?? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ091 -
Outsource Link Building?
Currently we are in the process of creating a new ecommerce website. The site is not live yet, but we have done all of the planning and brainstorming and now are just doing all of the dirty work to get things ready to go live. We are devoting a lot of time on merchandising and developing the site, but currently do not have the resources to put together a good link building campaign in house. Does anyone have any recommendations for outsourcing the link building? The last thing we want is to hire someone that submits to bad neighborhoods and only directories. Is there a good, better, best scenario we should be looking at for pricing, ect? Obviously, like most who are starting a new site, cost is an issue at least until the site gives some sort of sign of life. Also, we are in the Pittsburgh area. We don't need to go local with this, but if there is someone particularly good in the area it would be nice. Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Link Building: No linked to content in industry
Hello, I'm doing link buidling for a small ecommerce niche. There's no resource content in the niche (looking at OSE Top Content) that has attracted backlinks (on any sites) How should this effect what resource content I should create. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0