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“I’m planning to create a central Blog site as an authority site and have several other blog sites that are categories or smaller related niches of the central one. I plan to link back and forth from each of them to the main authority site – here’s the real question…. Do each, all or some?

Do those blogs need to be hosted at different accounts? Do you have any specific recommendations on ways the links need to point for best juice?  Isn’t this idea better for traffic generation and SEO than just having a bunch of semi-related mini sites out there? Thanks” ~ Sally Sanford

Hi Sally,

Thanks for the question.

This brings back memories to a very rudimentary SEO test I conducted way back in 2001.

I setup 5 different domains, each with a unique but small 5 page website. I then linked each website to every other website and waited to see what would happen. They we’re all dropped from Google not long after (they were not for any other purpose than the SEO test so nothing lost in that respect).

FYI – And this is important – They were all on the same IP address, on the same hosting account and they had no other supporting links whatsoever (links from other independent websites).

I guess the reason why I begin to answer your question with this little memory is that even back in 2001 Google was starting to track and measure anomalies in the linking behavior of websites. There were rumors abound, but I decided to do a test to know for sure. It turns out that the rumors were right for once.

Fast forward almost 9 years now and not much has actually changed in respect to cross linking websites. Ultimately what you’re doing (or wanting to do) is called creating a mini net – a phrase coined by my mate Michael Campbell. He has a good book floating about called “Revenge Of The Mini Net” that you should try and get a copy of.

But the basic “jist” of it is as you suggest.

Create a “Hub Site” – what some people would call your “Money Site” or the primary website you’re developing. Also create several “mini websites” – then link them together strategically to help the search engine optimization of the entire mini net, but primarily your hub site.

Assume your mini websites are A, B, C, D, E.

A would link to B (but B would never link back to A). B would link to C (but C would not link back to A or B). C would link to D (but never back to A, B, or C). D would link to E (but never back to all the others). All would link to your hub site – your hub site would NOT link back to your mini nets in most cases. It’s easiest to visualize this as the spokes of a wheel with your hub site being the center of that wheel.

So, as a result, your hub site favors the majority of the linking power of the entire structure, and resulting search engine ranking improvements of the mini net as a whole.

So to answer the first part of your question – and this is best case to be as safe as possible from being considered manipulation…

Never link every website to every other website.

It’s ok to leave some holes in your “mini net structure” so things look more natural. Perhaps website C does not link to website D for example.

Wherever possible, always use unique IP addresses for each website. That generally means using different hosting accounts unless your hosting account provides you with multiple IP addresses and you have the ability to assign specific IP’s to specific domains.

In relation to the IP addresses, use a decent range of IP addresses wherever possible. What I mean by that is don’t use all consecutively numbered IP addresses. You want to spread the “C Class” out as much as possible. This might mean varied hosting accounts again depending on how flexible your current host is.

It would be recommended to use different hosting accounts in different geographical locations (but not entirely essential). Again this relates largely to the IP address issue but also the geographical location of the actual servers your sites are hosted on.

Your mini net NEEDS to be supported by incoming links from other methods.

A mini net in itself is not going to have a dramatic impact on search engine rankings (particularly for more competitive markets and keyword terms). It might be ok for the “low hanging fruit” but any SEO campaign in relation to linking needs to be comprehensive.

The above applies to every site in your mini net – all mini websites and your hub site. The incoming links should also come from as varied a source as possible wherever possible.

That means submitting each website to; website directories, creating several articles for each site and submitting them to article directories, doing strategic link exchanges, social bookmarking, blog commenting, social networking, press releases, RSS feed distribution etc.

The collective power of the mini net these days comes from the strength of the “total picture”.

The funny thing about search engine optimization is that nothing really changes.

It has and always will be for the foreseeable future (the next few years anyway) 95% about building incoming links to your website, and 5% (maybe even less if I’m honest with you) about how well your website is optimized internally.

The latest fad right now is to create what is called a “link wheel”.

This is just another version of the “mini net” but rather than create all of the individual supporting websites yourself and develop them as individual entities (there’s nothing wrong with that – particularly if you can earn revenue from each website), you piggyback of the “authority” of other major hub sites out there.

Sites like squidoo.com, hubpages.com, wetpaint.com etc.

You create a small website on each of these authority websites related to the same niche, link them as described above, and have them all link back to your own “hub site”. It’s the exact same principal (but is the “newest thing”). You then submit each of these mini websites’ RSS feeds to RSS feed directories to give them a kick in the pants to get them indexed faster.

The key point here – whether you create your own, piggyback off others, or do both – is that you need supporting incoming links to your own hub site from as many other sources as possible – other than just your mini nets or link wheels.

There is no magic bullet or one source of incoming links that’s going to do it for you.

To answer the last part of your question which is about theme relevancy…

“…create a central Blog site as an authority site and have several other blog sites that are categories or smaller related niches of the central one.”

…yes, the more closely related the theme of each mini site, the more impact it will have (rather than using semi-related themes as you mention). In addition to that however, the anchor text you use to link them together is just as important.

You want to link to each website with the keyword terms you’re looking to obtain high search engine rankings for as the actual link itself.

This is quite a big topic so I hope this has been at least partly insightful and I’ve done it some justice in this brief response.

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