Although today is a holiday in most of Canada, that doesn't stop me from writing! This tip is more about search engine optimization (SEO) than AdSense, but since good SEO practices are critical to getting traffic and to obtaining relevant and useful ads, it's always important to pay attention to SEO.

Multi-Site Linking

Today's topic is multi-site linking. It's not uncommon for AdSense publishers to branch out and create more than one site or blog. In fact, one could argue that you almost have to do that to make serious money with AdSense or any other content monetization method — see my free e-book for why this is so.

It's very tempting to link your sites together so that visitors can find the other sites and to spread PageRank around, especially if one or two of your sites are very popular and/or authoritative. But random linkings between sites can do you more harm than good.

It's All About Relevance

As the Web continues to evolve, more emphasis is being placed on the relevance of links. If a site links to an unrelated site, the value of that link is degraded by the search engines. Do it enough times and the value of all links on that site can be downgraded and even the site itself may get flagged as being irrelevant or non-authoritative.

Google in particular puts a lot of trust in the perceived authority of a site. One can assume that they have or are developing systems similar to TrustRank to determine how “trustworthy” a site is. Google employee Matt Cutts, who heads up their search quality team, often discusses sites with irrelevant links on them to explain why those sites have been downgraded or dropped entirely from the Google search index.

So think before you link: is the site you're linking to relevant to the discussion at hand? Is the page you're linking to the most relevant page for the topic?

But how then is the average AdSense publisher supposed to link his or her sites together if they're on completely different topics?

Six Degrees of Separation

The answer lies in the six degrees of separation concept. This is the theory that says any human can be linked to another human via at most six hops: if you're my friend/spouse/co-worker/child that's one hop; if you're a friend of one of those, that's two hops; etc. Although every person only has a small number of direct links to other people, the network of links grows exponentially as the people that the others link to are considered and so on.

Now apply this concept to the Web: instead of linking directly to a site, link to another site that links to the destination site. Or link to a site that links to a site that links to the site. And so on and so forth. The trick is to keep the links relevant along the entire path. That's what's going to get you the most bang for the buck.

A concrete example might help clarify this. Say you have created two sites, one about dogs (a la pet fence guide) and one about gardening (I don't have one of those). There's probably no reason to directly link the two sites to each other. But what if you created a third site that could link to both of the other sites and that the other sites could link to?

Dogs. Gardening. Hmm… How about a site about common plants that are harmful to dogs? You could easily link to it from the dog and gardening sites. And it could link to the other two sites itself. Ideally, you'd deep link to pages within the sites and not just their home pages.

And here's a twist on this strategy: make these “linking” sites (you may need more than one to make the transition from topic A to topic B) non-commercial. Don't display any ads on them. No affiliate links. Just content. Now get those sites into the DMOZ, the Wikipedia and other directories or sites that like non-commercial sites. Sure, you won't make money directly from these sites, but there will be a spillover effect to the sites they link to.

Not everyone wants to link their sites together. But if it's something you do want to do, think about creating intermediate/transitionary sites as an SEO tactic.

Sponsored Link: Review my AdSense case study for a step-by-step account of how to develop a simple site monetized with AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

Another reader-submitted site, DB4T.com is a directory of technology and gaming. The owner of the site wrote to me about the problems he was having with getting his blog listed in the search engines:

I have tried to submit my site to Google and Yahoo. However, it takes a very long time for the spider to crawl my site. Now, I can search my site from Google but not Yahoo. I also don't get many visitors to my website.

Getting a blog indexed is actually very easy. Besides submitting the URL of your site to Google, Yahoo and MSN, also submit the feed for your blog to those three. Use the links on my handy-dandy Search Engine Submission Pages list. Of course, a link to your site from a frequently-indexed site like this one will pretty much ensure that the indexing happens. That's why I offer this service to my readers!

Of course, getting indexed doesn't guarantee you'll get traffic. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know I talk a lot about strategies and tips you can use to get more traffic. Spend some time walking backwards through the postings — it'll be worth it!

Sponsored Link: Have you taken my free Profitable Niche Discovery course yet? No? Why not?

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

Another reader has setup a new blog thanks to the information in my book. Anecdota.org collects anecdotes from all over the web, publishing only the best stories that it finds.

Again, if the owner of the blog will excuse me, here are some ways to improve the blog:

• First of all, there are limits to what you can do using a Blogger-based blog. The good thing is that Anecdota.org has its own domain and is not using a Blogger subdomain. Think about switching to using WordPress, though.
• The layout needs some work. It would be nice if the box containing the blog posts and the box on the right with the topics, archives, etc. lined up. Also, the home page link looks out of place by its lonesome. (And it doesn't work on individual post pages…)
• Speaking of the home page link, it might be worthwhile to place a horizontal link unit next to it, since you have all that empty space to work with.
• The placement of the AdSense banner right above the entries like that isn't great. Again, since you're using Blogger there are limits to what you can to customize the layout. Ideally you'd want an ad unit associated with each of the top 3 blog entries, but I'm not sure you can do that with Blogger (it's trivial with WordPress). So for the main page of the blog you could try placing a leaderboard ad in the header area and one at the bottom, though the latter really wouldn't be seen by anyone. If you could get Blogger to only show the last 3 entries in your blog on the home page then you could place an ad unit at the top or bottom of each post and not go over the 3-per-page rule. You can certainly do this for individual blog posts.
• You're linking directly to the original articles for where the anecdotes came from and not making it easy to read them directly on your own site. You might want to rethink that, and you might want to add some commentary about the postings. (Don't get me wrong, you need to credit the original source and link back to it… but at a minimum open those pages in new browser windows…)

Yes, it needs work. But everyone's first blog needs work. I was playing with this blog's design for quite a while, and I still tweak it once in a while. The important thing is that the blog is started and that it's got some real content to it. Good luck!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.