Setting up Web 2.0 sites in your own name or business name?

[AAttias]

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?

[TheAverageGenius]

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.

[AAttias]

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.

[TheAverageGenius]

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.

[irvingw]

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.

[matbennett]

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).