In-bound Linking from Mini-sites

Sitting back and watching our competitors recommend these practices today can sometimes be frustrating. Knowing they’re taking advantage of everything that they can - if you just bought a few links or slapped together and published some WordPress mini-sites, bought/registered a whole lot of domain names and took short-cuts, your website would be much higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages) – leaves me annoyed.

A word of advice - having been there and done that - shortcuts cost you in the end.

Methods Used by Search Engines to Identify Abuse

The age of the domain name 

Although Google gives a new domain name a short boost when first published, around 3 weeks, it is moved to the sandbox for a long period of time (up to a year in very competitive industries). Websites need to earn Google’s respect. Google monitors the site’s popularity – do people talk about and link to the website. Do popular and credible website link- and send traffic to the website?

Domain names that have been in existence for long periods are preferred. Why? Well, this means that you are serious about business and are not just registering an arb domain name for in-bound linking.

Link juice, PageRank and back linking 

Google used to regard links to a website as votes for it. This obviously encouraged abusive practices.

At the moment, Google have eradicated abusive back linking by only counting the links from website that have a PageRank of more than 5. It is impossible that a website that is made up of few pages, with similar content to others, have very few back links and new domain names ever exceed that value. Therefore adding no value to the parent website.

Link sharing too is neutralized by Google cancelling these votes out.

Honesty is the Best Policy

Google and other search engines invest enormous amounts of time (and money) recruiting very smart people to find and eradicate spammers and black- and grey hat “SEO experts” and punish paid links. You can be sure that although paid links and spam may work today, the industry is fighting against it, with the potential for you to lose a whole lot more than what you gained in the short term.

By focusing on and investing in the generation and publishing of contextual information to a website combined with good design and development principles will guarantee SEOobjectives – short and long term.