Setting up Web 2.0 sites in your own name or business name?
-
I'm interested in starting a link wheel strategy. However, when it comes to setting up the web 2.0 sites I'm unsure as to whether to set them up in my own name or in my business name. My initial thoughts were that it would appear more natural in my own name but if I have many sites linking to the same page, isn't that bad for SEO?
Does anyone have any advice?
-
Looking at your original question about registering web 2.0's in your name or your company's - doesn't matter for ranking but it's a question of your goal: are you branding? Are you just trying to manipulate rankings?
If the latter, it doesn't matter who you register under. If the former, probably your company's name. But it's not as if you can't build the web 2.0's - they're links to get all the same.
As for what to do instead of link wheels - I'd start with finding your top competitors across tough terms, as well as consistent competitors across your long-tail KW's. Mainly you want to find the sites that are ranking for the tougher terms, and follow their best and strongest links if you can. Since you're posting in the SEOMoz forum you can start with the SERP analysis functions of the keyword research tool.
I also use other tools to find competitors across niche related keywords (A1 Keyword Tool from Microsys is one): but you want to find quality competitors and not just copy anyone online: you could be copying a link profile of a poisonous website and repeat their mistakes.
That's why I'd start looking for those sites that rank for the tougher terms. Find their best links, try to copy them.
Link acquisition is more than copy-cat SEO, though - you can read plenty more about it in the forum or YouMoz blog, or one of Rand's many posts on the matter of link building - but I'd suggest looking at making your site(s) capable of attracting links, finding raving fans of your brand and give them incentives to share your content (i.e. build links - like running a contest for instance), creating awards for other websites that are somehow correlated to your site and getting a link via the award (an older but effective method)...
I'd run from the "flavor of the month" methods like link wheels because it's not going to net you quality and sticky links. Those links will have a high amount of link rot and are designed to provide the link wheel company/software provider with a recurring income, meanwhile in today's environment you'll simply be out-running and inviting Google's manual review (especially if a competitor decides it's best to rat you out in Google Webmaster Tools: link wheels are easy to find).
When your site drops rankings, the answer is always going to be, "build more links," or "use another tool," or "you did it wrong, but keep building more links to replace the links you've lost." Meanwhile it's time and money down the drain.
Solution: build a defensible link profile.
Go for the links that are harder to come by because your competitors are too lazy to try: they're all busy with link wheels.
Think of it this way: the PageRank/link juice of a link is calculated on a logarithmic scale. It's much harder to get a PR 6 link than 100's of PR 1 links. The site that gets the former is going to out-rank the site floating on the latter, and it's just a matter of time before the temporary rankings generated from the cheaper methods get penalized or otherwise demoted by the algo.
But experiment: all this is just my experience. After Penguin I've had to rethink everything, but I was one of the loudest mouths supporting link wheels and everything else "that worked..." That short-sighted pragmatism wound up biting me in the end.
You might find something in your experimentation that I totally missed, but I don't want the responsibility of giving out more bad advice, so I'm more cautious in what I share these days.
-
Ok since no one is recommending the link wheel strategy, what would you suggest? My company has bought about 10 domain names related to our business that we plan as using as blogs for backlisting to our other websites. I thought the link wheel would work well across these extra domains, and in fact I have been encouraged to do so.
-
My initial thoughts were that it would appear more natural in my own name but if I have many sites linking to the same page, isn't that bad for SEO?
Does anyone have any advice?
- If you're interested in how "natural" it looks, my advice is to avoid link wheels, which aren't natural.
- Your name/business name doesn't affect the rankings of the web 2.0 properties or your website.
- The only concern here should be what you're planning on doing once you've invested the time into the strategy only to find Penguin 2.0 isn't as dumb as Google 1.0, but that's my opinion (having my own old link wheeled properties and sites obliterated in Penguin 1.0, thought I'd share).
What's "bad for SEO" here is the technique you're using - it's years old at this point and not a sustainable business model, but that's a risk you're going to have to assess as time goes on. I maintained rankings doing this for a few years, but not after Penguin 1.0 - my advice (since you asked) is to find a more defensible link building strategy, and a traffic generation strategy that is Google-agnostic. You'll be better off in the long run.
-
If your name or your business name gets penalized those are two main ways people won't be able to find you.
Since those will most likely be low competition keywords they should rank on their own for their searches. I wouldn't play around with link building schemes with important domain names like personal name and company name especially if you are new to link building, I would do this on alternate domain names that won't cause too much grief if they get penalized.
-
My advice: be careful!
Link wheels are pretty much a text book definition of 'manipulative link building', which is what Google is trying so hard to penalise. It certainly is possible to build high quality, high authority references for hub sites to support your sites in a high quality way. However link wheels usually mean low quality pushing links to more low quality content that serve as a shield to push PR to your site.
I'm not saying that this can't work. However be aware that you are clearly trying to manipulate results so that does bring risk. If you are increasing risk then you really want to understand the topic before building links in such a way.
Short version though: If you are building genuine high quality links and resources then why worry? Use your name. If not then definitely cover your bum (and be prepared for possible future backlash).
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
-
One or multiple backlinks from business profiles?
Hi, When building diverse backlinks to a website it's often possible to place one, or several, links in the business profile on a directory or social platform such as https://www.broadjam.com/Scambler, https://coub.com/scamblermusic, https://issuu.com/scamblermusic or https://soundcloud.com/scambler. Typically I would only add one backlink to these profiles (and that would be to the home page) but I often wonder if I should take the opportunity to add several links to internal pages and blog posts. Am I missing an opportunity to add more backlinks and spread out the link juice, or could multiple backlinks within short profiles be considered spammy? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.
Link Building | | JCN-SBWD1 -
How do I set a link as a "do follow"?
I have a page from a state agency linking to my website. They have good PA and DA. How do I tell google to "do follow"? It is already showing up as linked to my site, I just want to make sure I'm getting the SEO juice! 🙂
Link Building | | Kuhliff0 -
Linking to Your Site: Search Console Update
After links have been removed from site a to site b. How long will it take until site b will see it in the webmaster tools that the links to his site are no longer there?
Link Building | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Multiple links from a single web-site
When one good web-site (PR5) has a link to my web-site - it's great. But, if this site has a second link to my web-site from another page, is this also good? Or, let me ask in a different way, will my web-site get "double benefit" from that web-site?
Link Building | | ditoroin0 -
Changing Anchor Text and Domain Name on external sites
Hey guys, I was hoping somebody might be help with my current dilema. We have a international website due to go live soon which has changed its brand name. It is International educational website funded by the government is all I can tell you I'm afraid. They have over 40,000 inbound links many of which are images. I'm wondering what i site best approach. To contact the web master of the top PR sites and ask them to change the listing to the new brand? I was also thinking if I was to leave most of them there as they would be redirected anyhow. Could I be clever and add the new brand link to some of these sites without removing the old and reap the benefits of having two links, the old site url and the new site url? Here is the main dilema though, the commission wish to keep the old site live for 6 months before we can redirect. Thanks, Rob
Link Building | | daracreative0 -
Why is my Page Rank 0.
Hi, I am trying to understand why my Page Rank is 0. Many forums say that it is because my site has been blocked by google. Any help with this would be much appreciated. http://davincidrivers.com
Link Building | | MariaPerrone0 -
Link building and directory links to a new site
I have three new sites all hosted on the same server in the same public html folder and each site is in a different folder inside the public html folder. These sites are a listing of live music venues in different cities in Texas. Should I link these sites together to increase page rank to each other and also put key search phrases in the anchor text and place these links in the text in the center of each page of each site to make the links more effective? Also, because the sites are about a year old they don't have many inlinks yet. If i submit them to about 50 directories will Google not like this because there are way more directory links than natural links? I've been told that it is trouble to have more than about 50% directory links compared to natural links. Thanks in advance for your answers! Take care,
Link Building | | Ron10
Ron0 -
How to target keywords on a new site?
I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive. After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search. I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords? Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.
Link Building | | timscullin1