Six Degrees of Web Separation: How to Link Multiple Sites
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.
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