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Building a Link Network? Do Not Make These Nine Mistakes

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I hate using Black-Hat SEO. I am firmly convinced that sooner or later, no matter how sneaky one can be, Google will find a way to catch those illicit links. White Hat is the way to go. It does involve a lot more work, but the results are long-lasting. Listing a site in reputable, heavily-moderated directories “approved” by Google, guest blogging, social bookmarks, press releases and, most importantly, building relationships with other webmasters is the way to go forward. Sometimes, however, a niche may be so competitive that using White-Hat techniques will never be enough for a new site. Even when the site is a high-quality one, getting the chance of establishing the right connections to earn those well-deserved links will be hard, especially if the site is on page thirty of Google. For my own sites, I use a completely different but very slow technique, which I called the micro-to-macro strategy. It is purely White Hat, and it is not what I am going to discuss today. If one is in a hurry and, as said before, the niche is a very competitive one, Black-Hat SEO or Gray-Hat SEO may be worth a shot. If the site is a quality one, the dirty work can serve the purpose of pushing it to the top of the search results and getting noticed by other webmasters, in order to obtain more natural, valuable and long-lasting links. In 2014, the only feasible method to artificially create effective links is buying aged domains, and use them to build a link network pointing back to the money site. There is one simple rule that one has to remember when embarking in such a momentous task:

If a Human Being Can Tell It Is an Artificial Link, Then Google Probably Can Too!

The whole matter boils down to that. When building a site on an aged domain, make sure that the site looks like a real one to an intelligent, competent and pragmatic SEO expert. If it does, then it will be unlikely that Google will find out that you are cheating. In particular, there are nine facts that you must keep in mind.

Building-a-Link-Network

1. Forget About SEO Hosting

The days of SEO hosting are numbered. Finding out who is hosting a particular Web site is extremely easy. I wrote a long, exhaustive tutorial on the subject. Knowing that a Web hosting company offers SEO hosting, makes it easy to figure out that all sites hosted by those companies are fake. Google are not yet there, but they soon will be. It is unlikely that they will apply a penalty, as long as they have no evidence that the links were paid for, but the links will be devalued, and much work and money wasted. The solution is to use a different Web host for every site. Very cheap shared hosts can do the job. Even free Web hosting can give good results. There are enough decent free and cheap Web hosts to accommodate a network of about fifty sites for something like $20–$40 a month.

2. Use Several Registrars

The best two places to buy aged domains from are GoDaddy Auctions and FreshDrop.com. You should make sure to use different accounts to bid on each domain. Now, the accounts are not free. Bidding on GoDaddy costs $4.99 per account. Those would be $200 for fifty accounts, but I highly recommend you to go this way. Google does not yet check Whois records, but you can bet an arm and a leg that they will be doing it soon, if they have not started experimenting yet. If you do not want to register a large number of accounts, you can register four or five of them and then push the domains to several different, free accounts on different registrars. Always purchase Whois Guard and use a different email for each domain.

3. Do Not Spam

Everybody hates spam, so do not do it. Do not use spun, unreadable crap for your sites, do not use character encoded articles and add valuable content. Build your site and take a look at it. Does it look real enough to fool an SEO expert? If it does not do the job, it is unlikely that Google will be fooled. Build a site that says something. Make sure to have contact information and linked social accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. Provide an email and a contact form. Remember that the site does not have to, and should not in all cases, be a blog. If you need articles, outsource them and let them be high-quality useful articles, which will entertain your human readers.

4. Monetize Your Site With Different Affiliate Links

Why is there a site built on your aged domain? To link back to your money site, right? Wrong! You do not want anyone to know that, so monetize your Web site with affiliate links, banners, eBooks, Amazon widgets or whatever else you want. Do not use Google AdSense, however. There are alternatives such as Bidvertiser, if you are up to making a few extra bucks from your aged domains. Do not use the same affiliate links that you have on your money site, even when cloaked. There are ways to find out a user’s affiliate ID from such links.

5. Do not Install Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools

Even if you are behind a proxy, stay away from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Both of these can access your computer, put cookies on it and spy on you easily. We give our consent to Google to spy on us when we sign up for these services, and it is not out of this world to assume that they may use this information to find out if our sites have one and the same owner. Better be safe than sorry!

6. Do not Sell Links To Third Parties

When Google decides whether to penalize a site or let it enjoy a good dose of clicks and impressions, it does so thanks to specific thresholds. If the level of trust of a Web site goes below a certain value, then the site will start getting penalized. One way to lose points in the eyes of Google is to be in a link neighborhood with poor-quality sites. Selling links on a link network that you use to promote your own site is never a good idea. Even if the sites are good quality, chances are that if they are buying links from you, they are likely buying them from others too. The others may not have been lucky enough to meet with me, so that I may open up their eyes as to the correct way to do it with my infinite wisdom. If those sites get caught, you will get caught too. So what should you do? Have nothing but links to your site on the aged domains? Not at all; link to other sites in your same niche. Choose ones that you are not competing with for your most relevant keywords, Link only to best quality sites: the ones that dominate your niche or similar ones. Throw in a few high-to-medium-quality domains to make everything look natural.

7. Do Not Lose Your Pagerank

Many domainers and SEOs complain that after buying an aged domain, this loses its Pagerank and authority. They immediately start pointing fingers at the seller and shouting ‘scams’. Notwithstanding that one has to be extremely careful when buying aged domains and follow a specific set of rules, it is more often the case that the Pagerank is lost naturally. Although Google says otherwise, 404s can cause a site to lose both Pagerank and authority if they are conspicuous. Check the link profile of your aged domain and reconstruct all pages that are linked. If there are hundreds of them, rebuild those that have a higher Pagerank or authority and are linked more often than the others. You do not need to upload the same content that was there before. Just make sure that there is unique and relevant content.

8. Be Careful With WWW

Every domain has two versions ranking on the Web: the ‘WWW’ version and the ‘non-WWW’ version. One will have a higher Pagerank and authority. Check which is which. When you set up your domain, you will choose either of these as the main one, and use a 302 redirect on the other one.

9. Do Not Limit Yourself To WordPress

Use Joomla, Drupal and other content management systems. Do not simply use WordPress each and every time you build a new site. If the Wayback Machine has results for your aged domain, try to use the same CMS, which the domain was developed on before. Use different plugins, themes, structures for different sites. As with anything in SEO, diversifying is the key to success.

That was it. If you follow these rules, chances are that you will be able to enjoy your aged domains for a long time to come. In the end, it all boils down to creating a Web site that looks natural in the eyes of anyone, which includes humans, pandas, penguins … and teddy bears too , maybe. The tenth rule is to try and avoid black hat techniques, as much as possible. When a niche is so tough that you either have to use them or forget it, try to make them only a very small part of your SEO strategy. I do not think I have left anything out. Do you have anything else to add, or some tips that I missed? Feel free to comment below; I will reply to each and every one.

The post Building a Link Network? Do Not Make These Nine Mistakes appeared first on XTND MarketPlace.


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